


Towards Stars Unseen

by AOnceToldStory



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Action & Romance, Alternate Canon, Canon Compliant, Canon Rewrite, Developing Relationship, Finn is force sensitive, Finnpoe - Freeform, Fix-It, M/M, Mutual Pining, Realistic relationship, Slow Burn, Stormpilot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:14:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 29,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21865054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AOnceToldStory/pseuds/AOnceToldStory
Summary: “It’s an instinct,” he would say quietly, reverently, to fascinated ears, glancing sideways into the cockpit towards a tuft of black hair and greased cheeks. “A feeling. The Force brought me here. To him.”From the very first moment, Finn knew who he was going to become, what was going to happen, and who he would be most afraid to lose along the way. He just didn't know that he knew.[Sequel Trilogy Fix-it. If Finn and Poe's relationship had been intended from the beginning, until the very end. Expect softness, drama, angst and pain. Canon divergent but compliant. Currently 35% through The Force Awakens.]
Relationships: Finn & Rey (Star Wars), Poe Dameron & Finn & Rey, Poe Dameron & Rey, Poe Dameron/Finn
Comments: 95
Kudos: 415





	1. [TFA] The Sands of Jakku, I

“It’s an instinct,” he would say quietly, reverently, to fascinated ears, glancing sideways into the cockpit towards a tuft of black hair and greased cheeks. “A feeling. The Force brought me here. To _him_.”

* * *

“Why did you do that? Huh?!” he would scream, voice thick with rage and tears. Callused hands would reach up to touch his face, then drop like something heavy. A smile, equal parts satisfied and sad, fading slowly. “You’re so stupid... Stay with me, alright? Stay with me!”

* * *

“I made a decision that day,” he would exhale. As if the words were shameful and not something to be proud of. As if the one he knew should hear them hadn’t already proven that he cared. A _lot_. “I wasn’t going to kill for them. I wasn’t going to _let_ them kill. So I got him out. And when I took off my helmet... he looked at me like no one ever had.”

* * *

Somehow, as he kneeled in the sands of Jakku, the desert night putrid with smoke and the smell of burning flesh, FN-2187 knew that he would say all of those things. Hours, days, months from now... He didn't know when or where or to who, but a distant part of his panicking mind just... _knew_. So when his fallen comrade’s hand fell away from his mask, dragging bloodied fingers down the white finish, FN-2187 stood up like a newborn animal. Taking in the world with young, innocent and absolutely terrified eyes.

He hadn't even fired his blaster yet. Hadn't got the chance. Or maybe he'd chosen not to, even before he realised that he had that choice. The battle continued in a whirlwind of laser fire and explosions. Screams cut short by perfectly aimed blasters. The civilians— _so many_ innocent civilians—were rounded up and held at gunpoint. An elderly human male, perhaps the village head or a hermit of some sort, stepped forward to meet Kylo Ren, who joined the FN unit on the ground only after the fires had all been set. The black-clad demon of the Force cut the old man down like he was paper. It was all FN-2187 could do not to throw up in his helmet, but he stood still and closed his eyes—nobody could tell the difference anyway.

He opened them at the sudden sound of blaster fire, which shouldn’t be happening. The whole village had been disarmed. What he saw was another human male, much younger than the first, with thick black hair and fire in his eyes, frozen solid mid-step with his blaster hot in one hand. Kylo Ren had the man’s every muscle pinned down with his powers—powers that FN-2187 would someday understand—and waited until two Stormtroopers grabbed the assailant and knocked him to his knees.

FN-2187 prepared to close his eyes again. He couldn’t stand to watch the slaughter of the older man—how could he watch this one be cut in half? But he found that he couldn't look away. The panic in his heart, the storm in his head, it all seemed to hone in on the scene before him. As if he was meant to watch it. As if something about it—no, about _that man_ —would make a difference.

_ I know him. _

The young man wasn't killed. Kylo Ren ordered the prisoner be brought aboard, then stepped back to allow Captain Phasma to take command. FN-2187 almost didn't hear the order to raise his blaster. His eyes followed the prisoner, the man screaming for the Stormtroopers to stop, please _stop, don’t do it, please!_ but his cries were left unheard. FN-2187 aimed where he was told, placed his finger over the trigger button, found a target among the dozens of men, women and children they were surrounding, and...

Decided.

_No._

_Not this. Not now. I can’t... no wait..._

_I won’t!_

Nobody questioned it. The villagers all died anyway, the rest of their homes were turned to ash and the one surviving prisoner’s X-wing— _a Resistance pilot?_ FN-2187 wondered—was destroyed. The FN unit returned to their transport and flew back to the _Finalizer_ , every one of them bringing home the stench of death like a trophy. But not 2187. He deviated from his march out of the transport and into another, already empty one. His head was spinning. Cold sweat beaded on his mocha skin, which ashened but didn't pale. In a desperate attempt to catch his breath, he tore the bloodied helmet off and leaned himself over a resource crate.

“FN-2187,” Phasma’s voice bellowed, soft and blood-curdling. “Submit your blaster for inspection. And who gave you permission to remove that helmet?”

“Sorry, Captain,” he managed to say, sounding far too close to how he felt.

“Report to my division at once,” she demanded, then left.

FN-2187 felt a lot better after that. Instead of panic, confusion and nausea, he suffered migraines, restlessness and anxiety. Every pair of eyes seemed trained on him, following him through the corridors, in re-conditioning class, in the barracks. He had no idea what he should do, but he knew what he could _not_ do. He couldn't tell anyone. He couldn't show that he was planning something—what would that even be?—and he definitely, absolutely fricking _could not_ stay.

_Resistance pilot._ The words burned themselves into 2187’s brain, along with the image of the now imprisoned man’s sweat-damp curls and the echoes of pleas through clenched teeth. Suddenly the solution was just _there_ and it’s all too simple. Free the pilot, get him something to fly and go as far away as they possibly could.

_If he is still alive, that is. And if he even is a pilot. And if he knows how to manoeuvre First Order craft. And if we'll be able to get a First Order craft._

_ And if he’ll trust the stormtrooper who randomly suddenly decided to rescue him. _

Lots of ifs. FN-2187 ignored each and every one of them. His black undershirt was soaked by the time he'd crossed from one end of the _Finalizer_ to the next, a trip that took little over an hour by foot and when trying to avoid the section’s he wasn't supposed to be in. He wasn't on patrol duty, or even cleaning duty, but nobody questioned him on the way. Too many troopers everywhere, too many reasons to be someplace and just enough of a hole in surveillance for 2187 to reach the detention bay unhindered.

FN-2187 had heard many stories about what happened to Kylo Ren’s prisoners. Horror stories told in whispers in the hours after curfew or when cleaning out-of-earshot nooks and crannies. While he did believe them, having seen just enough of Kylo Ren to imagine him stripping skin and burning fingers with his lightsaber, it didn't feel real until he entered the Resistance fighter’s holding cell.

It wasn't the physical wounds that haunted him—bruised cheekbones, dirtied clothes and blood dried into the pilot’s hair. All easily reversible things. No, it was the _eyes_ that FN-2187 would never forget. Black in the dim light of the interrogation chamber, exhausted and completely empty of hope. Gone was the spark of rebellion that he glimpsed down on Jakku, replaced with something even darker than a wish to die. Betrayal. Hatred at himself. Whatever Ren wanted from him, the pilot must’ve given it up.

“Ren wants the prisoner,” 2187 said to the guard. The pilot’s head fell backwards, struck the metal behind it hard. FN-2187 refused to look, afraid that he'd get caught looking sympathetic.

It was surprisingly easy to get the prisoner released. Nobody wanted to question Ren’s motives, even on a ship as bound by regulation as the _Finalizer_. The prisoner stumbled every second step, kept on his feet only by FN-2187’s grip on his arm. He held his blaster to the pilot’s chest the whole way through the detention bay, but his finger was far from the trigger. The pilot didn't notice, or didn't care. Maybe he wanted to be shot. 2187 hoped not. They had to get somewhere private so they could talk, so that he could explain. If the pilot caused a scene before that, they'd both be dead for sure.

The second they got to an empty transport corridor, 2187 located a service path and shoved the pilot inside. It was crammed, echoey and doorless, but it would have to do.

“Listen carefully,” he hissed quickly. “If you do _exactly_ as I say I can get you out of here.”

The pilot gave a puzzled face. He was in his late twenties, early thirties—2187 wasn't sure. It felt weird to look into the face of someone who didn't also belong behind a helmet. Someone who seemed scared by the white armour instead of—

He quickly took it off. Of course the man wouldn't trust him if he couldn't see his face. FN-2187 breathed deeply to calm his racing heart, gathered his thoughts into one thing; hurry or be caught.

“This is a rescue,” he nearly spat. His eyes locked hard with the pilot’s. _They’re not black,_ he realised, _not fully._ A warm, dark brown, just a little deeper in hue than 2187’s own reflection. “I’m helping you escape. Can you fly a TIE fighter?”

The pilot eyed him up and down. His expression softened slowly, taking in everything about the now unmasked Stormtrooper before him. Youthful, but not innocent. Honest and determined. FN-2187 couldn't tell if those were his opinions of the pilot or what he thought the pilot was reading from him. Either way, the man’s eyes locked again with the trooper’s, now with a whole new form of spark.

Hope.

“Are you with the Resistance?”

_How the hell could I be—?_ “What? No! _I’m_ breaking you out!” He closed his eyes, took another deep breath, then spoke a lot quieter. “Can you fly a TIE fighter?”

“I can fly _anything_.”

The way he said it, confident and forceful, made FN-2187 laugh. He hadn't laughed in months. The pilot smiled as well, which looked rather strange on an otherwise broken face. Had 2187 been more in tune with himself, with his inner self, he might have even heard the echoes of future words right then and there. He didn’t. They remained in the deepest parts of his soul, still unspoken, but soon to be.

The pilot’s eyebrows sunk, something like a last spark of fear returning to his eyes. “Why are you helping me?”

_Because I want to live. Because I want to get out of here. Because I want to stop having to kill innocents. Because I want… I want… want…_

_No… that’s not right._

_A feeling._

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” he said, a couple of seconds too late.

The words felt right on his tongue but sounded weird to his ears. The pilot didn't seem to believe him at first. For a moment, 2187 was afraid that the man would try to fight his way out of the service path, try his luck without Stormtrooper help. But that didn't happen. Instead, he gave the young trooper a second once-over, slower this time but not awkward. Judging the younger man, deciding whether or not he could be trusted.

After a short moment, the pilot smirked. “You need a pilot.”

FN-2187 let out a breath of relief and thought to himself "Yes. Yes, I need a pilot."

_Shit. Said that out loud. Didn’t mean to say that out loud._

The Resistance fighter was grinning widely now. The fire in his dark brown eyes reached a new intensity, hot and sort of manic. It pulled all of 2187’s conviction right out of his hands, used it as fuel to make the flames of reborn hope burn brighter. It left FN-2187 feeling both frightened and reassured.

“We’re gonna do this,” the pilot snickered. Then he stood up straighter, leaning ever so slightly closer. In contrast, the limited width of their hiding place became very clear. “Ey, what’s your name?” he asked.

The question had an unintended effect. FN-2187 was suddenly made aware of the rising amount of seconds they’d been in there, each one bringing with it more danger of exposure. Someone somewhere would realise that Kylo Ren did not request to interrogate the prisoner in his quarters— _why would he ever do that? That was stupid. This is stupid_ —and cameras everywhere would show exactly where the the pilot had gone and who had brought him there.

“No time,” he said instead. The feelings returned, the barely-there sensation of having heard something deep within. An echo of things yet unsaid. “We have to move. _Now_.”


	2. [TFA] The Sands of Jakku, II

The second the Stormtrooper removed his helmet, Poe Dameron was reminded of every time he had ever imagined what could lay behind it—behind the masks of hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers, past and present, Imperial and First Order. Nameless entities that he would have no problem shooting out of the sky if it meant freedom for the galaxy. He had pictured cold, mindless eyes on pale faces, with no voices and no thoughts of their own. Much like the clone troopers his parents had told him about, one was no different from the next. Every single one a killing machine, merciless and expendable.

So when this one showed his face—skin glistening with sweat, a round, strong jaw and space-black eyes full of fear and resolve—Poe was taken aback. The young man was nothing like the nightmarish creatures Poe had spent his childhood being afraid of. In fact, in a way that he could never have anticipated, the man was beautiful. Glowing.

All at once, Poe forgot his hopelessness. His rescuer was real, _tangible_. He couldn't imagine someone who looked so frightened to be lying or playing with him. This wasn't a game. Poe had been given a second chance—a chance to die fighting, or maybe even to not die at all.

It was all he could do to keep up the act.

The moved through the _Finalizer'_ s maze of hallways speedily. The Stormtrooper's helmet was back on and his blaster sat snuggly up against Poe's side. The electro-shackles were no longer activated and Poe held them in place for show. He slumped his shoulders, pretended to be walked to his death instead of away from it, hoping that the latter wouldn't be visible on his face. They were lucky. Nobody questioned them along the way, and before long they entered one of the Star Destroyer's many hangar bays. It was humongous and open, all white and black and shiny metal. Row upon row of TIE fighters of varying models, at least a hundred personnel and twice as many Stormtroopers bustling about. The back wall was nothing but a shield door glowing brightly in blue, beyond it only empty, star-littered space.

As they walked through the hangar, Poe felt the gloved hand around his bicep tighten. If he didn't know better, he'd say that his rescuer was trembling.

"Stay calm, stay calm," the young man inside the helmet mused silently. Poe fought the urge to talk back—he knew that the words weren't directed at him. He wished that he could assure the younger, but he didn't dare. All of his senses were focused on survival, on making sure that no one was watching them or thinking of getting in their way.

A band of white-armoured troopers, identical to the one behind Poe, approached them with synchronised steps. Poe kept his head down and his feet dragging. The blaster poked him a little harder in the side. A desperate act, but it worked. The squadron paid them no mind and they passed each other. The second they were out of earshot, Poe's rescuer pulled at the sleeve of his jacket discreetly and they turn sharply to the left.

Commands of unimportant nature echoed through the hangar as the Stormtrooper climbed up a small ladder and disappeared into the belly of the second-row TIE. Poe followed as fast as he could. It was a tight fit, but he was used to small craft and one-size-fits-(almost)-all-butts light fighter seats. He took off his leather jacket to allow for more freedom of movement. How someone in a full plate armour could ever squeeze in there was beyond him.

The control panel was absolutely _stunning_. "I always wanted to fly one of these things," he smiled to himself, forgetting for a moment that he had company. "Can you shoot?"

"Blasters I can," the Stormtrooper replied from behind him, voice no longer distorted by the helmet. Their seats were back-to-back, but the cabin allowed sound to travel effortlessly. "Never trained for aerial combat."

"Same principle, I'll guide you through it," Poe assured him, although he hadn't even seen what the other side of the TIE looked like. "You should have a toggle to switch between missiles, cannons and mag pulse, a sight and screen to aim and triggers to fire. I trust you."

The Stormtrooper muttered something along the lines of it being hard to understand, but Poe had already gotten familiar with the controls in front of himself. As he explained once more, heart beating faster and faster by the second, he brought the TIE fighter to life around them, bringing the weapons online, turning the coms off and warming up the engines. Within moments, the black enemy vessel was in the air, swinging around out of its cradle.

They got a full ten metres closer to the shield doors before the docking lock and fuel line snapped them backwards.

"What's going on?!"

"I can fix this!"

"Fix what?!"

The hangar bay was in motion instantly. Surprise at first, confusion at why a TIE was on the move when no lift-off had been called out. Then came realisation. Lights flashed, soldiers gathered and weapons were pulled out. Somewhere in the chaos that ensued, Poe's rescuer finally found the controls that had been described to him and the hangar went up in flames. Shot after shot tore into the walls and windows. Dismembered bodies flew every which way, glass shattered and weapons were demolished. Poe felt sorry for no one. He didn't have the time to. He had to get them out of there, or their journey to freedom would be cut awkwardly short.

Finally he found the correct switch and flicked it. The cables detached with a clank and Poe thrust the accelerator handle forward. The TIE shot through the shield doors and out into open space like a laser beam, pushing Poe back into his seat and the pulling a gasp from the Stormtrooper who was hung from his safety belts.

Poe loved it.

There were already laser fire shooting past them when they swung around the bottom of the _Finalizer_. Poe fell back into survival mode and made up a quick plan in his head. He'd just have to trust that his rescuer could keep up. "We have to take out as many of these cannons as he can or we're not gonna get very far." The stormtrooper yelled his acknowledgement. "I'm gonna get us in position, just stay sharp."

His trust wasn't misplaced. One. Two. Three, four. One set of turbo lasers after another went up in flames. Poe swung them around and lined them up, and the Stormtrooper took out their threats. The young soldier cheered so loud it hurt Poe's ears, but he didn't mind it one bit. For every word that came out of the trooper's mouth, every tone in his warm voice, Poe felt more and more at ease. Individuality. The man behind him became a person instead of a faceless Stormtrooper. While one half of his present self focused on steering the TIE fighter, the other half couldn't help but want to know just who it was he owed his life.

"You didn't tell me your name," he called over his shoulder.

This time, the young man answered. "FN-2187!"

"F— what?!"

"That's the only name they ever gave me."

Poe, for a fleeting moment, thought he was being played for a fool. Then his heart sunk in his chest. Of course this guy had numbers for a name. It wasn't for nothing that Poe had believed the First Order's two-and-a-half _billion_ Stormtroopers to be all the same for years. Two-and-a-half billion soldiers bred for war didn't get to be individuals.

_Which makes this one even more special, I suppose._

"I ain't using it," Poe declared defiantly. Then the silence stretched a bit too far and he realised that he might just sound rude. He thought fast. _FN... FN..._

* * *

"Finn."

Spoken softly. With familiarity, with... care. Whispered, sighed, exhaled.

"Finn!"

Called in desperation. In anger. In relief.

"I'mma call you Finn, is that alright?"

He knew that name, or maybe he would. Or _had_. Wanted to. He liked it because it felt real. If that was because it held similarities to the only form of identification he'd ever known, or because it was the first thing he'd ever been given with the intent of being _kept_ , he could only guess.

"Finn..." He tasted it like a new food. "Yeah, Finn! I like that! I like that!"

The pilot laughed heartily behind his back. The Stormtrooper now called Finn felt his own lips curve as well. "I'm Poe, Poe Dameron!" the thus unknown Resistance fighter introduced himself.

"Good to meet you, Poe!" Finn said as if to someone he might not get to talk to again.

"Good to meet you too, Finn!" Poe replied, certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that they would get to talk a whole lot more than this.

* * *

I would turn out that Finn had a better intuition, while Poe had a more trustworthy gut feeling.

The _Finalizer's_ ventral cannons were hot. Weapons of that fire power were not meant for the hunting of small fighters, sending out four potent missile charges capable of bringing down large frigates. Poe evaded them expertly and Finn fired back as much as he could, but they were near impossible to lock on to. The Star Destroyer grew smaller behind them, which meant ahead from Finn's position, but the missiles were closing in.

As was the surface of the planet they'd been orbiting.

"Poe, where are we going? We need to jump to lightspeed!"

"Ain't no hyperdrive on a TIE of this size, pal," the pilot informed him regretfully. "And even if there was, we're going down to Jakku."

Death planet. Burning villages and sand. Lots and lots of nothing but sand. "Jakku?"

"Yes, Jakku. I need to get my droid before the First Order does."

"What, a droid?!" Finn almost snapped his neck trying to turn around in his seat. "No, no, no, we can't go back to _Jakku_ , they'll find us in no time! No droid can be that important!"

Poe's voice was growing exasperated. That was Finn's only clue as to how serious he was. "This one is. A BB unit, orange and white, one of a kind."

 _He's insane. I've rescued an insane person!_ "We need to get as far away from the First Order as we can. We go back to Jakku? We die!"

But Poe Dameron didn't give up—not that it mattered. He was behind the controls and would take them wherever he wanted. Finn could scream and protest, but in the end there just wasn't enough room in the cockpit to try and pry the joysticks from the other man's hands. As Finn wondered if he might be able to stop them from making planetfall some other way, he forgot what he was supposed to be doing—taking out the two missiles that still hunted them through space.

"That droid has a map that leads straight to Luke Skywalker!"

Not once in his twenty-two years of life or four years in the FN unit had Finn _wanted_ to be a Stormtrooper as much as he did now. The kind of information Poe just gave him would be enough to be promoted three ranks at least if presented to the right commanding officer. Even though they hadn't been told much, the FN unit were dispatched by Kylo Ren for the sole purpose of helping him track down that map. Of course, the regret of having helped Poe Dameron was short lived and he realised just how utterly and completely screwed they were.

He'd barely opened his mouth to express said realisation when one of the missiles graced their right flank. The weapon exploded in space beside them and took out their engine, sending the TIE fighter hurling into Jakku's gravitational pull with nothing to stop them.

* * *

_"Finn."_

* * *

_"Finn!"_

* * *

"Poe!"

The world was way too bright when FN-2187 opened his eyes again. At first he wondered if he'd really blacked out when Kylo Ren sliced that old man in the village down the middle, and now he was staring into the helmeted face of a very unimpressed superior. But the whiteness above him didn't come from a Stormtrooper's plates. It was the sky, void of clouds and impossibly pale. The heat wasn't radiating off of burning village homes, but rather from the scorched sand beneath him. His head spun like crazy, but he felt strangely fine. His limbs were tangled with something soft and heavy—a parachute?—and his whole body felt locked in place—seat belt.

Once unbuckled and on his feet, the events of the past few hours started to come back to him. Resistance pilot. TIE fighter. Missiles. Droid. He was on _Jakku_ , but not the same Jakku. Far from the village where he'd decided not to shoot. Far from the _Finalizer_. He'd survived the crash landing somehow.

And he wasn't FN-2187—he was Finn.

_I need to find Poe._

Even as he thought it, the pillar of black smoke became staggeringly clear in his field of vision. While Finn had landed in empty desert with nothing but his ejected chair, the rest of the ship had touched down on the other side of a vast ridge. His heart felt heavy. They'd come down so fast—how and when had Finn ejected? Had he done it himself or had his pilot? He remembered calling Poe's name right after the missile struck them, but there was no reply. 

He ran. It was pure torture to sprint in the slippery sand, especially uphill, but he did it. He ignored the bent armour plates that dug into his knees and armpits. His whole body was screaming, both from exhaustion and fear. He had _not_ just deserted from the First Order—deserted!—in order to rescue a member of the Resistance only to lose him this fast! Where would he go without a pilot? He was stuck on Jakku. And the connection that he'd felt... both in the burning village, and just now up in the still flying TIE fighter...

_A feeling..._

The wreckage was horrible to look at. Shattered wing panel pieces dotted the whole valley beneath the ridge, and smoke rose from the inferno a full kilometre into the sky. The main body of the TIE lay like a busted Shahoun egg in the middle of it all, spitting flames and the oh-so familiar stench of death in Finn's face.

He screamed the whole way down the hill. "Poe! Poe!"

His own side of the cockpit was completely destroyed and halfway buried in the sand already. Had he still been in there, he would've been crushed to death. Finn ran around to the other side, the pilot's side, where the damage was less severe and a hole in the windscreen allowed him to look inside.

Through the thick, suffocating smoke, he spotted leather.

"Poe! Poe, I got you!"

He closed his eyes, held his breath and reached inside. He found the leather and pulled at it, expecting there to be resistance as he tried to evacuate a whole person from the wrecked cockpit. But the garment followed with ease, empty. Finn looked at it, heart beating arrhythmically, then threw it aside. He reached inside again, further this time, hoping to find something alive to grab onto.

The ground was shaking. The whole TIE was slowly leaning forward as the sand gave way deep down. And just as Finn's instinct told him to step back, to move away from the vessel or be sucked down with it, he felt something else behind the smoke. Something made of flesh and blood and bone.

Poe's hand.


	3. [TFA] The Sands of Jakku, III

The TIE fighter was definitely sinking now. The crumbled metal screamed and fought back against the sand, almost as if _it_ was alive and didn't want to die. Unlike Poe. The pilot wasn't helping one bit as Finn struggled to get him free. Finn was standing halfway inside the cockpit now, thankful for the armour that protected him from the broken windshield glass. He couldn't see anything. The smoke burned in his eyes and throat. His gloves were too thick to feel where to unbuckle the seatbelt that kept Poe's unconscious form pinned into the spacecraft. Finn knew that he had seconds to get him loose, or their miraculous survival of the crash would be meaningless.

Because they had _both_ survived. Finn refused to believe that he was trying to save a dead man.

Finally, the buckle came off and Poe fell forward into Finn's arms. Finn lost his balance but used it to his advantage, pulling the Resistance pilot with him as he fell backwards out of the TIE. Then, as fast as he could, he grabbed Poe by the armpits and dragged him through the sand, away from the wreckage. Somewhere along the way he snatched back the leather jacket that he'd thrown to the side. They moved further and further until Finn's legs gave way and he became sitting on the scorching ground with the pilot halfway lying in his lap.

The desert sputtered and sent waves of sand several metres in the air. Air pockets far beneath the surface gave way for the weight of the TIE, sucking it down. The sand choked the fires and swallowed the smoke, eventually devouring the entire fighter. Silence followed when the ground went still and all Finn could hear was his own winded breathing.

He'd just turned his eyes to the man in his lap when the buried TIE exploded beneath them. The whole planet seemed to shudder and a tower of sand flew up in the air, raining down over the valley and the ridges. It got in Finn's eyes and it stung worse than the smoke had. He thought fast and used the leather jacket to protect both his own face and Poe's. When he was certain that the sand storm had stopped, he used the fabric on the inside to wipe his red eyes.

When he could finally open them again, he found himself looking down at Poe Dameron's bloodied eyelashes.

"Oh no."

Now free of the wreckage, Finn's panic was allowed to hit him full force. He removed his legs from underneath the Resistance pilot and laid him down with his head on the jacket. There was a brand new, blood-gushing wound on the man's forehead, much larger than the slits he'd suffered during interrogation. Blood had dried in a thick line down his face, glueing one eye shut and spreading like veins in the cracks on his lips. Finn knelt beside Poe and tried to make out of he was breathing, but his own body was shaking too much to tell. In frustration he tore his armoured gloves off. Throwing those to hell, he placed one hand over Poe's chest and the other just beneath his nose. Then he held his own breath... and waited.

It was faint, but it was there. Warm air blowing onto his skin, the signs that Poe Dameron had made it. Finn fell back into a sitting position and let out a long sigh of relief, followed by an unnecessarily loud fit of laughter.

_I just escaped the First Order. The First ORDER! I took one of their prisoners and we escaped! I'm out! I'm free! I'm—!_

Lost.

They'd crashed in the deserts of Jakku, which could be absolutely _anywhere_ on the entire planet. To the left, sand dunes. The the right, sand dunes. In front of him, burnt sand and metal scraps. Behind him... yeah, more sand. The sun was relentless and standing firmly almost right in front of them, rising steadily towards the centre of the sky. Had Finn been more observant before he left on this suicide mission, he would've looked up which side of the planet the _Finalizer_ had been shadowing, and where on its surface there were settlements.

Of course, he had never intended to go back _here_ , had he?

He turned his attention back on Poe. "Hey. Poe? Poe, come on, wake up. Talk to me." No response. The pilot was knocked out cold and still bleeding. Finn patted his cheek a couple of times, hoping that it might have effect, but Poe's head only lulled limply to one side, eyes still closed and breathing still shallow and ragged. Finn could only imagine how much smoke Poe must have inhaled before Finn got to him.

There was only one thing to do. They couldn't stay here, so they had to move. And if Poe wasn't going to move on his own, Finn would just have to do it for him.

As careful as could be, Finn made his way over the unstable sand towards one of the larger pieces of TIE wing panel that still rested above the surface. Using that and his own torn off shirt sleeves, shredded and tied together into a handle, he constructed a wheel-less gurney for Poe to lie on. He rolled the pilot carefully onto the metal with the jacket below him, then used what was left of his sleeves to bandage the wound on Poe's forehead. It was far from ideal and wouldn't work for long, but for now it was all he had.

"Alright, Poe," he said to his companion. "I'm getting us out of here. You just rest for a bit and when you feel like it, we can switch places, deal?"

Silence. Two sets of breath, already going dry in the heat.

Finn rolled his eyes. "Didn't think so..." Then he began pulling.

* * *

He started shedding his armour after the first few steps. The plates were broken in places and bent in others, impossible to move comfortably in. He'd already stripped himself to the shoulders and his arms were sizzling in the heat. He wished now that he hadn't thrown away his gloves, because the makeshift handle was cutting into his palm from the weight of Poe's body. But he didn't go back and he didn't slow down. If _he_ was feeling like he was being cooked alive, then how bad wasn't it for Poe?

He kept walking.

* * *

Hours passed. Undoubtedly.

Finn tried to keep on as straight of a path as possible, but there were sand hills just too steep to pull the pilot up. He tried it anyway one time, and ended up having to run back down to catch Poe, who had slipped off the wing piece and rolled helplessly down the ridge.

The thought struck him that he might have to abandon the pilot. His gut instinct told him that unless he did, they'd both die here. If he left Poe somewhere safe, maybe dug a shelter for him in the sand, then Finn could move faster and perhaps bring back help. Poe wouldn't survive that long, though—not alone. But no matter the logic of it all, of one of them making it to safety at least, Finn refused to even consider it. Instinct told him to keep fighting, that they'd find a way out of this desert and survive. _That_ wasn't coming from his gut, but someplace else. Somewhere deeper inside, even deeper than his newly awakened heart.

He wasn't leaving Poe. So he kept walking.

* * *

Finn was halfway dying by the time his struggles paid off. Salvation came in the form of a few dozen scattered structures bundled together below an especially towering sand dune. Finn was so happy that he could've jumped for joy, but he only had enough strength left to lift one corner of his bone-dry mouth.

"Told you we'd make it," he croaked to Poe, still not one bit closer to waking up than he had been at the crash site. Finn swallowed his worries for the pilot and let hope reign. "Let's get... some water."

It was an experiment getting down the steep slopes, but he did it. His throat felt like part of the desert. The skin on his arms, no matter how dark, burned and felt blistered by the scorching sun. Poe's tanned face had taken on a flushed, uneven redness. Finn had to admit that it was preferable to the greyish undertone the pilot had sported in the beginning. The blood had dried a sickening black on his forehead and cheek, though, cracking just like both of their lips.

Well down in the settlement, Finn noticed that most of the specks he'd thought were houses were in fact just spacecraft in varying degrees of decay, parked and covered with dusty tarps outside the village. He chose an especially large, flat one that was close to where they set down and pulled Poe towards it—something was telling him that it would not be a good idea to drag an unconscious, wanted man into that village. A feeling that the settlement was about to blow, one way or another.

He sat Poe up against the landing gear of the freight ship, where the shade was the darkest. The pilot groaned quietly in protest, slowly but surely surfacing but not yet conscious.

"Oh, _now_ you decide to wake up," Finn hissed. Poe nearly fell sideways but Finn sat him back up, hands tight on the pilot's shoulders. "Sit tight, I'll be back. And don't you _dare_ run off on me."

He took Poe's leather jacket and put it on. There were still marks on his undershirt that belonged to the First Order and he couldn't risk someone spotting them. Then he made for the settlement as fast as his weakening legs could take him. There was a startling mixture of intergalactic races among the dwellers that he met. He heard half-a-dozen strange languages just on his first run through the market place, screaming his raw throat bloody for water. Did _nobody_ speak Basic here?! Desperation took over his boiling brains. He pulled at the clothes of less than hospitable peddlers and traders. Each one sent him away more dehydrated than before. Finn ended up clinging to a support beam for his dear life just to keep on his feet, sweating precious liquid and breathing raspily. That's when the wonderful sound of _splashing_ reached his ears.

It came from a watering pool, occupied by an enormous, grunting Happabore. Finn stumbled over like a madman and nearly dove into the light grey, milky liquid that he didn't even know if it was water. He slurped it desperately, so fast that he'd already down half-a-litre when the foul taste hit his tongue. He gagged on it, wondered if it was somehow poisonous or just severely contaminated. Then he dove back in, sucking it down and trying not to think of what might be in it.

_You'll hate it, but it'll save your life._

Finn sent the thought Poe's way with a wry sneer as he stood up from the poolside, just barely avoiding the snout of the Happabore swinging at him. He had only just turned back towards the marketplace to find a canister of some sort when his ears caught another sound—a female yelling, pained grunts and metal striking wood.

A fight. Finn moved closer slowly, fascinated but careful. A single young human female against two masked and armoured thugs, all three screaming in anger and swinging their weapons at each other. Finn felt the urge to step in, to help the seemingly outnumbered girl, but she held her own with relative ease. It wasn't long before she had knocked them both on their asses and sent them scurrying for cover. Finn was impressed.

The girl, fair-skinned and with her hair in buns, knelt in the sand. She removed a tarp from something in front of her, revealing a droid far too colourful and clean to belong in a settlement like this. Orange and white, round like a ball with a magnetised head, bobbing back and forth and beeping excitedly at the girl. Finn's head was still too hot to connect the dots, but he found himself continuing to watch the pair for a little longer than he should have.

Or maybe he _should_. That feeling returned, deep in his chest cavity, tingling down his spine horizontally. Similar to the feeling he'd gotten when he saw Poe in Tuanul Village, the sensation of familiarity to a person he'd never met. A little like when the pilot had said his new name for the first time, the start of something Finn somehow already knew was going to happen. A feeling...

Fate. 

Before he could decide if he was wasting time, the round droid turned its optic in his direction and started _screaming_. Finn recoiled. The girl's brow furrowed as he conversed with the droid, pointing quickly in Finn's direction. Then, giving Finn no time to escape, the girl started running at him with the scariest face he'd ever seen on a human.

Normally, Finn was extremely fast. He had to be, or he wouldn't have survived for long in Stormtrooper training. But dehydration, sunburn and exhaustion made him an easy target. He'd only made it around one and a half market stalls, looking frantically over his shoulder, when the girl came at him from the front and floored him with a strike of her metal staff.

Finn chipped for air where he lay sprawled in the sand, the girl standing over him with the pointy end of the staff poking his chest where it hurt the most.

"What's your hurry, thief?!" she demanded.

Finn couldn't believe what he was hearing. "What, _thief..._?!"

"Yes, thief!" the girl spat, then the round droid rolled up next to them. It produced a sparking, forked rod from its belly and shocked Finn with it, so bad that it made him swear out loud. "The jacket. BB-8 says that you stole it!"

 _A BB-unit, orange and white, one of a kind._ Realisation struck Finn when he looked at the droid now. It was cute, way cuter than any BB-models Finn had ever seen aboard the _Finalizer_.

_Found your droid, Poe. Happy now?_

Finn sighed and looked up at the girl, weary of her hostility. "It belongs to Poe Dameron. That's his name, right?" BB-8 said nothing, only bobbed back and forth as if eager for Finn to continue. "He's Resistance, got captured by the First Order. I helped him escape. We stole a TIE fighter, but they shot us down in the desert. I pulled him out and got him here."

Now BB-8 started beeping. Looked from Finn to the girl and back, lights blinking all over his main body. "So he's alive, then?" the girl asked.

"Not for long unless you get this _thing_ out of my face," Finn hissed, swatting the staff end away from himself. "We were stuck out there for a long time, he needs water."

The girl's whole demeanour shifted instantaneously. She put the staff on her back and stood down, instead offering her hand for Finn to take. He accepted the help to get to his feet, then brushed the ever-annoying sand off his clothes.

"I have water," the girl said. "I have to get BB-8 back to its master, it says that it's very important but won't tell me anything else." Then she suddenly looks over her shoulder, voice low and face softer. "So you're with the Resistance?"

 _Why does everyone— wait... that's a good thing, right? Resistance. Poe's Resistance, and that's good. I can be Resistance too, because I sure as hell ain't telling her that I'm—_ "Obviously." He stood up straighter, glanced around as if suspicious of his surroundings, and whispered. "I'm with the Resistance, yeah. Me and Poe Dameron. We're with the Resistance."

The girl gave a beautiful smile, so far from the death glare she'd shot him only moments before. "I've never met Resistance fighters before."

"Well, this is what we look like," Finn grinned, then realised how stupid he sounded. "Some of us. Others look different. Poe's got lighter eyes, and much more hair."

"BB-8 is so happy," the girl continued, looking after the droid now patrolling around the marketplace as if searching for Poe. "It must get back to your base, it says. I found it in the middle of the desert, almost out of charge and beeping on about some secret mission."

Finn was struck with another realisation. He put a hand over his still burning forehead. "It's carrying a map that leads to Luke Skywalker."

"Luke... Skywalker...?" The girl said the name with a reverent tone, spoken like of an idol or a god. Her eyes grew large and wondrous. "I thought he was a myth."

"Yeah, no," Finn quickly stated. "And the First Order wants that map bad, so we have to get back to Poe and get him and me and _that droid_ —"

He never got to finish that sentence. He's interrupted by said droid skidding back to where they were standing, squeaking loudly and beeping in a frenzy. Finn had no clue what the little thing was trying to say, but the girl obvious did. "First Order?"

They both looked up, and sure enough, there they were—four Stormtroopers, blasters held close and speaking to a native of the village. Before Finn or the girl could react, the villager pointed in their direction. The lead trooper's eyes and Finn's met through the black eyeholes in the former's helmet. BB-8 gave a new, frantic bleep.

"Run," Finns breathed. The girl didn't move. "RUN!"


	4. [TFA] The Sands of Jakku, IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Thank you all so much for the love! Much kudos! You make this journey so enjoyable! Thank you I love you I know!
> 
> 2\. I was asked what exactly I plan on "changing" from the movie to this adaptation. Apart from the obvious, being a fully canon, slowly developing, true-to-character Finnpoe, I'll also "correct" a few characterisations that I felt could have been handled better in the movies. Those include Rose Tico (actual plot importance, no forced romance), Zorii Bliss (also not made solely for romance), Poe (not as cynical and irritable, more like his TFA self), Luke (closer to what I think Mark Hamill would've wanted), and lastly Finn (not as obsessed with protecting Rey, who is more than capable of protecting herself).
> 
> 3\. If you have other suggestions for what could be nice to "fix", I'll take them. No guarantee that I'll use them, but if I like them then they're in!

Finn had no idea _how_ he had known that the village was going to blow up. He called it experience—the sort of intuition one learns during years of military service no matter how involuntary—and moved on with his life, which at the current moment consisted mostly of _running_ for his life. Blaster fire rained down around him and the desert girl, sending merchants and dust flying in every direction. What had appeared to be a squad of troopers turned out to be three squads, because Finn could make out at least eight separate sets of weapons being fired at them. His ears were used to the explosions when filtered through a helmet, but not when exposed like this. 

By the time they managed to find cover, his heart was pounding so loud in his chest that he could hardly hear the girl speak.

"They're shooting at both of us!" she said in between sharp intakes of air. BB-8 bleeped something and the girl nodded quickly. "Alright, three of us."

"Yeah," was all Finn could say in defence. "They saw you with me. You're marked."

The girl shot in an incredulous look. "Well, thanks for _that_!"

Finn was only listening with one ear. He ran about the small hut they used for shelter, peaking through holes in the tarp walls to see where their predators were. He'd lost his bearings in the chase and had no idea which way he'd left Poe. If they didn't get to him fast, the First Order troopers would find him in no time. Finn's chest felt tight. Only ten minutes ago, Poe had barely had the strength to sit up straight. If he was discovered, he wouldn't be able to fight back. They'd capture him—again. Finn doubted that he'd be allowed to live a second time.

He was just about the voice these worries to the girl when the air filled with the signature beast-screaming sound of approaching TIE fighters. Now Finn's heart truly sank. An air raid. If they targeted the marketplace while they were still in it, they'd be torn to shreds by the explosion or burned to death by the heat radiation that followed.

Finn grabbed the girl by the wrist and tugged her along forcefully, but she had already recognised the danger. They shot out of the tent-house at top speed, BB-8 rolling behind them as best he could. Finn quickly reoriented himself. He spotted the flattened, open sand field where the many spacecraft were parked and ushered the girl and droid to follow him. The freighter where he'd hidden Poe stood second farthest from the end, a Corellian YT-model that had seen _way_ better days. At the time, he'd thought it was a good idea to leave his new friend at a safe distance from the settlement—now he felt like an idiot. In order to get to Poe now, the three of them had to move out into the open, where not only armed Stormtroopers would be able to see them, but also the TIEs that were undoubtedly already over their heads.

A deafening blast and a scorching heat wave proved Finn right. One third of the village behind them went up in flames and the already screaming masses begun wailing. The two TIEs whistled by after the first drop and came back around, guided by orders from the ground, and prepared for another run. Finn didn't stop to think if they had any other options—a wave of blaster fire rained down around them, forcing them out into the open anyway. Finn took off towards the freighter, leaving all potential cover and shelter behind. The girl was close on his heel, making sure that BB-8 was keeping up.

The TIE fighters had finished their roundabout and were approaching them from behind fast. Ground troopers commed out the targets’ position, and the fighters aimed their second payload. Too busy dodging the blaster fire that by now came from all around them, neither the girl nor Finn were prepared for the incoming bombers. In the last second, Finn jumped sideways to push the girl to the side, but she was already instinctively moving in that direction. They successfully dodged the worst of the blast, but were still sent flying by the shockwave. Scrambling out of the sand they'd crashed into, both of them continued their sprint across the field in unison, side by side, keeping tabs on the other.

Immediately, there were three stormtroopers on their tail. "Hey! Stop right there!"

"Keep moving!" Finn yelled over his shoulder, as if the girl would do as the troopers asked. "We're almost there!"

"Look out!" the girl suddenly yelled.

They were halfway across the field. Finn could clearly see the place underneath the belly of the freighter where he'd left his pilot, only he wasn't there anymore. Instead, there were two shapes in white armour sprawled on the ground. Neither of them were moving. The only movement Finn could see was by another of the ship's landing gear, and the aiming of what appeared to be a First Order issue blaster rifle in his direction.

Both Finn and the girl ducked on instinct, but the shots came nowhere near them. Instead they hit someone behind them, taking them out almost instantly. Judging by the distorted scream, the victim was one of the Stormtroopers chasing them. A moment later, another laser beam overshot Finn's head, finding a home in the chest of a second enemy trooper. Finn kept running. The sniper kept firing, soon taking out the third Stormtrooper as well. By now it was clear who was helping them—a mess of black hair and a blood-streaked, stubbled face.

_I know him._

"Poe! Poe!"

Finn nearly hurled himself underneath the freighter, skidding in the sand to find cover by Poe's side. The girl was close behind, making herself small up against the landing gear, her staff raised and ready to fight. Poe was lying on his stomach in the sand, using the ground to keep a downed Stormtrooper's assault rifle steady. Finn's eyes flickered between the very-much-alive pilot and the two troopers lying dead behind them. Poe's eyes were watery, his fingers trembling over the trigger. His lips were so badly dried out that the cracks were bleeding, and there were a couple new cuts and bruises on his face. All in all, he was a complete wreck.

"How the hell did you knock out two stormtroopers on your own?" Finn demanded incredulously.

"How the hell did you manage to find my droid?" Poe asked back. BB-8 raced up to the pilot so fast it sprayed sand in his eyes, then pressed its body and round little head tight against Poe's arm. The droid chirped and beeped in so much joy that even Finn could tell that it was happy. Poe gave it a quick scratch like a furred pet, then returned his hand to the rifle. "I'm glad to see you too, little buddy. Finn! Where are we, who's the girl and what in spaces is going on here?"

"The girl's name is _Rey_ —" Rey cut in before Finn had a chance to speak. "—and your Resistance friend here just dragged us all into a war just by showing his face. We need to move! _Now!"_

"Sorry to involve you, Rey!" Poe called over the screams of the circulating TIE fighters. "If you can get me something that flies, I'll get us out of here."

Even as he talked, Poe moved the rifle slightly to the right, then pulled the trigger. The first two shots missed, but then a Stormtrooper on the other side of the field fell from a fist-sized, sizzling hole in his head. The pilot wiped his brow in frustration, dragging flakes of dried blood across his face. He was fighting exhaustion. Finn could clearly see that Poe was in no shape to pilot anything, no less any of the junk heaps that surrounded them.

_Then again, he was in no shape to fly a TIE six hours ago, and he did that, so... Besides, what choice to we have? We have to get out of here, as far away as possible._

Finn sighed and placed a hand on Poe's shoulder, lightly as to not screw up his aiming. He almost removed it just as fast, though, but stopped himself last second. The notion that touch was forbidden had come from his Stormtrooper instincts. No companionship in battle. No kneeling beside fallen comrades. He hated it. No matter how short the time since his desertion, he wouldn't allow himself to be dictated by the First Order anymore. He allowed the grip on Poe's shoulder to become just a tad firmer in pure defiance.

"What about this one?" Finn suddenly realised that they were hiding underneath as-good-of-a-spacecraft as any other in the field.

The girl, Rey, did not agree one bit. She frowned at the scratched up, partly exposed belly of the ship. "This one's garbage! We could escape in that Quadjumper, over there!"

She pointed to the only ship in the bay whose appearance didn't discredit its flyability, a TUG-b13 with four enormous engines. But by the time she had finished her suggestion, the TIEs were coming around for their third bombing run. This time, they targeted the long line of ships outside the settlement. All three of the hiding refugees, even BB-8, ducked their heads when the ships zoomed past over them, as if it would shield them from a missile, but the first shot missed the YT-model freighter and instead hit the next ship in the row. It blew up in a tower of fire that scorched the skin on their hands. The same happened to the next ship, and the next.

The universe was not on their side, Finn decided begrudgingly, because the second to last ship to go up in smoke was the very Quadjumper Rey had suggested. Rey grunted in disappointment.

”The garbage will do. Come on!”

Rey was already on her feet, running for the right flank of the freighter where the boarding ramp was located. Finn and BB-8 both made to follow, then the droid halted when Poe didn’t immediately join them. The pilot struggled to his knees, using the landing gear and rifle for support.

”I’m fine,” he grumbled when he felt Finn’s eyes on him.

Finn would have none of it, having already dragged the man from a shipwreck and through the desert. He grabbed Poe by the arm and threw it over his shoulder, using his own body as a crutch. His legs seemed alright, Finn concluded, but his dark eyes looked milky and unfocused. A concussion, perhaps?

Then he had a realisation.

”How far ahead of you can you see?”

”It’s a little blurry,” Poe replied with a bleak grin.

”A little or a lot?”

”... a lot.”

Finn furrowed his brow. “You just shot a sniper rifle over my head. How’d you know where to aim?”

”White armour,” Poe snickered. “Dark skin. I could tell the difference.”

Rey easily overrode the, frankly quite ancient, lock on the ramp door. She ran inside like she knew the place, flicking switches as she went. Finn and Poe followed after BB-8, Poe slammed the button that retracted the boarding ramp and Finn judged the vessel to be at least fifty years old. It was dusty, smelled strangely of bad air and seemed far more manually operated than most, of not all, First Order craft Finn had ever been on.

”Gunner position’s down there!” Rey yelled before she disappeared around a corner of the circular corridor, pointing down a narrow shute with a wall-mounted stepladder.

Although he had never actually been aboard a YT-1300, Poe knew the model as well as he did most other spacecraft. “Where’s the second one?” he called after her.

”Gone!”

Poe and Finn looked at each other for a split second, wondering between them how a whole gunner’s box could just be _gone_ , then they both snapped into action simultaneously. Poe grabbed onto the wall to steady himself and shoved Finn lightly towards the hole Rey had pointed to.

”Do your thing, I’ll help the girl.” Finn nodded his acknowledgment. Poe gave a quirky smile. “Switches, sight to aim, triggers.”

The ship started to come to life around Poe as Rey warmed up the engines from the cockpit. Poe made his way towards her with difficulty. The sharp, spine-chilling sound of more TIE fighters approaching penetrated the hull of the old Correllian freighter. On the floor by Poe’s feet, BB-8 rolled along, bleeping nervously.

”Ey, we’ve gotten out of worse the both of us.”

In the cockpit, a four-seated, domed space with controls and readers installed high and low, Rey was stretching her whole body across the two front chairs to reach. Her fingers came just short of the switchboard on the co-pilot’s side. Waving her hand away, Poe flicked the three pressurisation switches himself, then sunk into the co-pilot’s seat as Rey floored the thrusters. The freighter screamed and complained, thrusters misfiring several times before finally igniting properly. The tarp blew off the ship by the force of the propulsion engines and the freighter lifted off the ground.

It took Poe a full two seconds to familiarise himself with the controls before him. He retracted the landing gear, prepped the shield generator and activated the navi-computer on his side.

”You know how to fly this thing?” he asked the girl beside him.

”Do you know how to co-pilot?” Rey asked right back at him. Her eyes said ‘nervous’ but her voice held confidence.

Poe could do nothing but grin in respect of both. “Fair enough. Shields are up, thrusters hot. Get us out of here.”

Rey drew a deep breath and grabbed the steering bars firmly. Lasers struck the hull from the ground with little effect, but the TIEs were coming at them with alarming speed, cannons aimed and ready.

”Hold on!” she called, and the small freighter shot forward across the desert, leaving the TIEs in the dust.


	5. [TFA] Aboard The One And Only, I

Poe had doubted the freight ship's speed and maneuverability from the second he set foot inside of it. He'd readily admit to having doubted Rey's flying skills as well, because someone who appeared to be selling speeder parts for a living couldn't possibly be trained for aerial combat. But with his own flying abilities severely impaired, Poe had no choice but to trust in both the ship and its current pilot.

He'd never, ever been so happy to be wrong. Rey was a natural, using everything from the ship's own weight against the gravity of the planet to the reverse thrusters to sharpen her turns. Poe focused on the things she just couldn't do while steering the ship, like concentrating the shields wherever their attackers were firing and communicate with their struggling gunner. Finn was doing his best, Poe had no doubts, but there was a worrying lack of responsive fire from the former Stormtrooper.

"Finn! How're we doing back there?" Poe called as loud as he could. He couldn't see down the gunner passage and the cockpit had no visual of the ventral cannon.

Finn called back to him, only mildly entertained. "This! Was _way_ easier! IN THE TIE FIGHTER!"

"Lean into it!" Poe instructed, remembering what he knew of YT-model gunner seat control. "Don't oversteer! Let the TIE's get themselves in your range of fire, then—"

It was difficult enough as it was to speak when the ship veered and spun then way it did. Rey was trying to evade the enemy from high in the air, which didn't offer much cover from anywhere. The sand dunes were dangerous things, though, looking all the same with high risk of misjudging their height, so Rey stayed clear of them. But no matter her skills, no one could outmanoeuvre two chasing TIE fighters with no cover in a ship like this. Poe felt extremely exposed. In an X-wing, he never did, even if a light fighter like that couldn't take half the damage this freighter had sustained since they took off.

"Keep low!" Finn shouted suddenly. Poe called back to see if they'd heard him right. "Yes, low! It confuses their tracking!"

Poe and Rey gave each other quizzical looks, but Poe was the first to bob his shoulders. Rey seemed to question his sanity as well as Finn's, but followed their advise. Poe wasn't about to argue against a Stormtrooper—former Stormtrooper—about inside First Order intelligence. In fact, he wished that he'd known about it, that TIEs had no real-time tracking modulation at low altitudes. There were at least two old Resistance fighters who would still be alive if they'd had that information.

The ride became a hundred times worse when Rey tried to keep to the ground. Poe closed his eyes and steeled his rebelling stomach. BB-8 flew around the back-end of the cockpit, making dents in the wall coverings with its weight, screaming uncharacteristically foul things in Binary.

"Bee-bee, you gotta hold on!" Poe yelled at the droid, even as he himself struggled to not fly out of his chair. A couple more TIE fighter blasts, one after the other, struck the underside and left flank of the ship, sending it veering off to the right. Poe caught worrying cries of pain from their gunner and his heart skipped a beat. "Finn! Finn, you alright?!"

"We need cover!" was the younger man's frustrated reply. Poe felt a rush of relief at hearing him alive, but the feeling was temporary at best.

Up ahead and quickly closing in was something Poe knew existed on Jakku but had never expected to see up close—a number of Star Destroyers sticking out of the sand dunes like gigantic shards of metal, busted open upon impact, half-way buried and streaked with black from fires long gone out. The whole desert seemed littered with scraps from them. Poe could see six ways to use the old war machines for cover just by looking at them, all of them risky and dangerous. But _he_ wasn't behind the controls, and Rey was racing towards the closest Destroyer wreckage at an alarming speed.

"Ey, Finn?" Poe yelled over his shoulder. "We're about to get that cover you wanted! Hold on down there!"

Rey dove the freighter sharply down a ridge, entering a tunnel of star fighter exo skeletons. She swung back and forth to evade the TIE fighters' precise aim, dodging more laser than she took. Poe helped guide her where he could, having more experience in judging just what kinds of turns the ship could make without slamming into the debris around them. Rey ignored him at first, too focused on the moment to think ahead, but quickly adapted to doing both. While she flew the ship, Poe planned their trajectory, and Finn finally had a chance to get a good aim on the enemy.

* * *

With the flying pattern less random, Finn caught the farthest TIE fighter with his cannon, blasting the thing right out of the sky. It exploded against a metal pillar sticking out of the ground, the half still intact rolling off into the sand, pilot disintegrated. Finn cheered at the turn of the tide, taking pride in Poe's responding calls from the cockpit.

"Nice shot!"

_One down, one to go. We can do this. We can do this..._

The odds were far from even, though. A single functional TIE was more than enough to destroy the freighter and kill its passengers with one shot. Finn fired back with everything he had, but with the loss of its companion, this TIE fighter pilot plain refused the stay still. The Correllian freighter shuddered with each shot that struck her. Poe worked magic with the shields, but could only do so much. In the end, the TIE managed to put the odds back in its favour. Finn raised his arms to shield his face when the cannon beneath him went up in flames. Sparks flew by his feet and in his lap as the machinery gave in. The rollercoaster ride that his seat had been came to an abrupt halt and the cannon itself lodged in place. Finn pressed every button he could see, but the cannon wouldn't move. With no other choice, Finn accepted his defeat and turned over his shoulder.

"Poe! Rey! My cannon's stuck in forward position, I can't move it! You gotta lose the last TIE!"

* * *

In the cockpit, one extremely nauseous Poe shook his head in a desperate attempt to see clearly, then leaned forward over the console to take in their surroundings. They'd almost come around the other end of the buried Star Destroyer, zig-zagging between its scattered, rotting innards and the sand dunes, trailing dust and smoke from the freighter's laser wounds. Out of the four massive engines that had once propelled the Destroyer, two were still above ground. Both were empty, like huge gaping mouths of darkness, stripped of each of its million components. Poe judged the hole to be just wide enough for their ship to fit through if flown diagonally, with margins if tipped even further than that.

By the look on Rey's face when he glanced at her, she was thinking the same thing.

Poe grinned in satisfaction, even as his gut screamed at him that this might be the last daring move he—and his new friends—ever made.

"Get ready down there!" he called to Finn as Rey made to deceive their hunter. She steered away from the Star Destroyer in a wide upwards circle, Poe helping by gradually cutting engine power, then she floored the thrusters when they came around. The TIE followed, but was left behind and confused when the freighter suddenly disappeared among the remains of the Star Destroyer's stern.

* * *

Finn's jaw fell open and his heart sank when he realised what the two pilots were attempting.

"Are we really doing this?!"

No response. Yes, they were. And Finn had nothing to do but to enjoy the ride, hoping that if Rey's talents failed her, the crash would be spectacular enough to kill them all instantly.

* * *

It was an incredibly tight fit. Rey did her best to stay clear of every unexpected obstacle that came in their path, dancing more than flying through the dark insides of the Destroyer. Poe continued to adjust the shields to help the ship bounce off the walls instead of crashing into them. The TIE was miraculously still on their tail. Smaller and more maneuverable, it even gained a little on the YT freighter. Rey paid it no mind, focusing forward. Poe _would've_ minded, but something in the pit of his stomach told him that Rey knew what she was doing. There was a plan to this—he just didn't understand it yet.

The world returned to light in an instant. The freighter had crossed straight through the Star Destroyer and come out the other side, or rather in the middle, where the whole fighter had split open like an eggshell. Rey put her whole weight into forcing the speed lever down, effectively killing the engines while still arching up towards the sky. Poe whistled through his teeth as the G-forces took hold of his body. The ship went dead quiet, gravity slowing their ascent and turning the ship over in mid-air. All of a sudden, Poe realised what the girl by his side was intending.

_She's a genius. An absolute genius!_

Below them, the TIE shot out of the Star Destroyer's hull. Not knowing where its prey had gone, the TIE continued forward instead of turning to the sky. This left it completely open for attack—from a locked-position cannon that was now in the perfect angle to fire.

* * *

Finn didn't miss a beat.

The moment the enemy ship was in line, his fists clenched the triggers hard. A rain of laser fire came down over the TIE. Its pilot had a maximum of point-three seconds to realise what was happening before the black fighter exploded like a firework, adding a hundred more pieces of metal to the trillions that already covered the spacecraft graveyard. Finn screamed his throat raw in celebration. Echoes of the two pilots cheering made it clearly down to his position, as well as a series of happy beeps from BB-8.

* * *

Free of their chasers and far from the ground forces at the marketplace, Rey could finally steer them towards the atmosphere. A minute or so later they emerged into open space and the planet's gravitational pull let go of the ship. They soared into the endless blackness, leaving Jakku and everyone on it behind. When her hands were no longer necessary to fly the ship, Rey jumped from the pilot's seat and ran out of the cockpit, cheeks wrinkled from smiling so hard. She met Finn just as he climbed out of the gunner's box, the young man also grinning like crazy.

Neither had the time to listen, too busy praising each other excitedly.

"Nice shooting!"

"Nice flying!"

"Thanks."

"How did you do that?!"

"I don't know!"

"You've never been trained?"

"I've flown some ships but I've never left the planet—"

"—it was amazing—"

"—I know, right?!"

A third voice, hoarse and ragged, cut through their friendly banter. "Yeah, you're both amazing."

Leaning himself on the wall, BB-8 by his feet, Poe stumbled out of the cockpit on weak legs. He was smiling too, his remark genuine. Finn's own grin became warmer just by looking at the pilot. But there was pain there as well, written into every cut and bruise now staggeringly clear on Poe's face. His pale, blood-streaked face.

The laughter was torn from Finn's lips. He was moving even before he knew why, there to catch Poe a split second before the man's eyes glazed over and his legs gave way beneath him. With one hand behind his back and the other on his chest, Finn guided Poe to the floor until they were both sitting there, the pilot's head resting heavy against Finn's shoulder. Poe was still conscious, although barely. The adrenalin that had kept him going until now was spent. Injuries from the TIE fighter crash made themselves reminded—a spinning head, sore ribs and a twisted knee. But no matter the pain he was in, when his brows eyes flickered open again, he still had the energy to smile at Finn.

"That was a little awkward," he croaked.

"Shut up," Finn told him, then turned to the girl hovering worriedly above them. He didn't need to ask her—she had already removed a canister from her belt and was holding it out for Finn to take. Finn unscrewed the lid and held the water bottle to Poe's mouth. "Here, drink. _Slowly_."

Unlike the muddy substance Finn had downed on Jakku, this water was clear and delicious. Warm, yes, from having lived in a metal canister in scorching heat, but nice all the same. Poe emptied the bottle in a long, desperate gulp, stopping to inhale only when the last drop was down his throat. It wasn't much, but it was heaven to his dried-out insides. Once his breathing returned to normal, Finn helped Poe sit back against the corridor wall. Rey had run off somewhere in the ship and came back with a small, blue-and-white bag. She put it down in front of Finn and crouched down a little to the side, silently observing as Finn opened the med-pack and searched through its contents. Bandages, Bacta-wipes, pain-killers, old-fashioned suturing equipment. He took one of the Bacta-wipes, hoping that it wasn't as expired as the retro packaging suggested, and tore it open. Then he reached up and carefully unwrapped the make-shift bandage of black shirt fabric from Poe's forehead, uncovering the worst of the wounds he'd sustained in the crash.

BB-8 rolled up by Poe's side when the latter winced in pain. It hummed something in Binary that Finn couldn't understand, bumping Poe's arm with its body.

"I'm alright, buddy," he assured the droid, patting its head gently.

"No, you're not," Finn object. "Sit still."

Poe wanted to protest, to steal the wipe from the younger man's hand and do it himself, but he didn't. He let Finn's scarred hands—training, not war, but Poe didn't know that—clean the dried blood from his forehead, as gentle as a father would their child. The Bacta felt like a hundred ice-cubes to his skin at first, followed by a numbing sensation and then heat as his cell got to work. Finn exposed a raw, open gash below Poe's hairline, smaller than it had appeared when gushing with blood but still sickening to look at.

"Might need stitching," Finn noted simply. "But we don't have a medical droid."

"This is the second time you save my life," Poe suddenly said, chuckling softly.

Finn scoffed a little. "It's just a flesh wound. You're not _dying_."

"I meant in the desert. I didn't eject before the crash, my chair jammed. You pulled me out of the wreckage, didn't you?"

Finn opened his mouth, but then closed it again. Poe was watching him now, watching his hand as it cleaned the blood from Poe's cheek, his space-black eyes as they focused on _anything_ other than the brown ones looking back at him. Finn didn't need to see. He knew what was in Poe's eyes—the same disbelief as they'd held on the _Finalizer_ , the same hopefulness, the same determination to _trust_.

_I know those eyes. I know him, but not from before. Why do I know him? How...?_

When no answer came, Poe decided that he was right. "Thanks."

"You're welcome," Finn replied, hands and heart feeling warm.

When neither of the two men said anything else, Rey took the chance to ease her curiosity. She was sitting all the way down on the floor now, cross-legged and with an edgy frown. "So what's our next move? I suppose you two aren't going back to Jakku?"

"We are _not_ going back—!" Finn was almost on his feet at the mere idea of it, but Poe stopped him with a hand on his leg.

"We need to get to the Ileenium system," he told Rey. "BB-8 is carrying something very important and I need to bring it back to D'qar."

"The map to Luke Skywalker," Rey said, nodding in deep interest. "That's why the First Order is after you."

At the mention of the map, Poe shot BB-8 a doubtful look. The droid immediately denied having said anything, beeping something and bobbing its head in Finn's direction. Poe only looked at Finn, who didn't understand the accusation, then shrugged it off as pointless to hide anyway. "Exactly. I was on a secret mission to retrieve that map when they captured me. If it weren't for you and Finn, the First Order would have the map by now and I would be _very_ dead. Nobody was going to come for me, so I owe you my life. Thank you, both of you."

"Happy to help," Rey said, although Poe and Finn doubted that it was true.

Finn was thankful that Poe had opted not to mention the word 'Stormtrooper' in his retelling. However, something else that Poe had said stuck in his head. "What do you mean nobody was coming for you?"

"It was a lone-wolf mission," Poe explained. The undertone of sadness was barely audible through his ironic sneer. "I went in knowing that if I screwed up, I was on my own. No use in wasting hundreds of lives trying to rescue one man."

It felt weird to Finn, hearing those words, although he knew that it shouldn't. Never in the history of the First Order had any efforts been made to save a single soldier, or ten or even a hundred. Everything was dictated by necessity and gain. Lives meant nothing among Stormtroopers. One didn't even have to screw up in order to be abandoned. It was enough just to be unlucky. Finn had never had a reason to imagine the Resistance to be any different. For _any_ organisation to function differently. And yet, hearing Poe's story, he felt disgusted. Why would anyone want to fight for the Resistance if they left their agents to die at the hands of their worst enemy? To be interrogated, tortured and killed without mercy?

Finn definitely didn't want to associate himself with a group like that. He kind of already had, though, given that he'd told Rey that both he and Poe belonged to the Resistance. Poe hadn't mentioned that either. And now he was on a mission to return there. Finn's head was spinning. All he wanted was to get as far away from the First Order as he possibly could. He'd have to find a way of doing that along the way.

For now, he would stay with Poe and Rey.

"The Ileenium system's in the Outer Rim, isn't it?" Rey asked then. "It'll take some time to get there."

"I suppose this ship has a hyperdrive, though, right?" Finn scoffed, remembering the TIE fighter.

Rey looked at him like he was stupid. "Of course it has a hyperdrive. Then she pointed to herself, looking apologetic. "I can take you as far as Panima Terminal. From there it should be easy to get to the Outer Rim."

Both Poe and Finn sat up straighter in surprise. "What about you?" Finn asked.

"I have to go back to Jakku," Rey said, as stoic as could be. "I've already been away too long and—"

A loud _pang_ interrupted Rey and sent her flying to her feet. Finn and Poe stood as well, startled by the noise and the white smog that suddenly blew up at the end of the corridor. The whole hallway started fogging up fast, the source of it seeming to come from somewhere below the floor. Rey ran over with BB-8 at her heel, Finn following with a hand on Poe's arm to steady him.

"Quick! Help me with this!" Rey called. She found a service door in the floor panels and pulled at it, grunting with the effort as the thing was very heavy.

Poe pointed Finn in the direction of the engineering bay further down the hallway. "Tools. Anything and everything you can find."

"Got it," Finn said and scurried off.

Poe took a deep breath and let it out through his nose, then dug into his deepest reserves for energy. He was exhausted. But there was no rest to be had yet, and the mission was far from done, so they might as well push on. He got down on his knees and climbed down with Rey into the hole in the floor, assessing the damage.

They got to work.


	6. [TFA] Aboard The One And Only, II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my darlings! A late Merry Christmas to all to celebrate it and to all who have wished me the same, and Happy Days Of All Kinds to every one of you, no matter what you do or do not celebrate. Thank you all so much for your lovely comments and I'm sorry that I don't have the time to answer all of them.
> 
> I'm back with a new chapter after a teensy little hiatus, as well as a cover that you might have spotted in the first chapter. You may not have noticed, but I made a few small alterations in the fifth chapter, so re-read it if you like before you head on into this one. It's not super-necessary, though, but you might enjoy it.
> 
> Again, thank you all, keep on fighting your fights and hope you like this intermission chapter <3

The leaking propulsion tank was an easy enough problem to fix—tighten a couple dozen bolts that had nearly unscrewed themselves, reset the readers and disable the blown-out ones, wrap the whole breach in three full rolls of Coaxium Engine-grade sealing tape. Rey and Poe but their technical expertise to use and worked together. One had spent a lifetime reverse-engineering whatever droids and crafts had been available to her, the other had studied advanced mechanics in one of the galaxy's finest academies. Finn was an indispensable aid, running around the ship looking for replacement parts, tools, connecting pipes and wires. Checking the navi-computer for proximity alerts and suspicious signals. Keeping the two pilots from arguing when their opinions on how to solve an issue differed too much.

It took about half-an-hour before the immediate danger was over. Rey made a point to continue checking the other systems that might've suffered during their escape, but she refused both boys when they offered their help. They wouldn't be able to go to lightspeed in at least a couple of hours, since the older system required the Coaxium channels to empty out and refill before the hyperdrive could be reactivated. Going normal speed while still so close to the Jakku system was risky, but they had no choice. In Rey's own words, spoken as if from history, " _If we try to go to lightspeed now the hyperdrive will explode and send pieces of us flying into sixteen systems._ "

When it was clear that there was nothing more he could do, Poe’s strength gave in again. Once more, Finn was there before the pilot could collapse, ready to take him someplace quiet to rest.

There were a total of six beds on the freighter, all built into the walls of a circular room with barely enough room for two people to stand. The mattresses were dusty, thin and smelled old, with no bedlinen och pillows in sight. Poe didn’t mind. In comparison to the interrogation table on the Finalizer, where he’d spent nearly twenty-four hours in fear and despair, this narrow cot was a paradise. He fell asleep the instant his head hit the bed.

So fast that he didn’t even notice that Finn stayed in the room with him.

The younger man sat himself on a cot across from the pilot, bent over himself since there was no room to sit up straight. He massaged his hands, dry and calloused, and listened as Poe’s breathing slowed down and evened out. Only then, when he was certain that the man was asleep, did he dare to look at him.

 _I know him,_ he whispered to himself for the twentieth time. His train of thought, a chaotic mess of fractured impressions and experiences, began there, then went on to cover everything that had happened in the past one-and-a-half days. _What is this feeling? Why didn't I shoot in the village? I've been exemplary during training. Never once tried to rebel. Never even talked back to a superior. FN-6634 did that, and VB-799. I deserted. I decided not to shoot and then I left! They'll come after me. But I'm alive. I'm not a Stormtrooper anymore. I'm someone. FN-2187. FN-2187. FN. Finn. My name. He gave it to me. I know him. What is this feeling..._

A shiver went up Finn's spine, spreading like a toxin into all his extremities. At first he thought that he was just afraid—they still weren't very far from Jakku, which meant not far from the First Order. They could have mounted a tracker on them, or their scanners might pick something up. They could catch up to the freighter and disintegrate it any second.

Another shiver. He realised that it was really cold in the sleeping quarters, which wasn't all that surprising. Space travel was always cold, especially on older vessels with limited heating possibilities. But Finn had never been used to cold spaceships. On ships like the _Finalizer_ , low-ranking Stormtroopers often slept in long corridors filled to the brim with bunk beds, sharing body heat without ever touching, so far back in the ship that the massive propulsion engines generated more heat than even the cold vacuum of space could battle. Many parts of a Star Destroyer were downright icy, especially where no normal personnel was expected to be, but the quarters of common troopers were always very hot.

Finn wrapped his arms around himself, rubbing his shoulders for warmth. He realised that he was still wearing Poe's leather flight jacket, the one he'd taken to hide his First Order undershirt down on Jakku. He didn't need it now, but he didn't want to take it off. The material was thick but pliable from years of use, probably much longer than Poe could have owned it. It smelled like leather often did—a murky, bland sort of smell. Smoke from the burning TIE fighter. Blood. And then something else... Something human. Earthy, but pleasant. Warm.

Finn realised that what he felt was Poe's scent.

He shook his head. He shouldn't want to keep something that wasn't his. But for the moment, he didn't see the point of giving it back. Poe was asleep and didn't seem to mind the cold. In fact, the pilot was sprawled out on his back on the small cot, arms above his head, face turned towards the wall. There were burn holes and tears in his pants and shirt. What wasn't covered in dust was smoked up, even charred in places. His shirt was low-cut and hung open, showing a bruised sternum. Something was resting in the groove of Poe's collarbone, attached at the end of a thin chain. A ring, Finn deduced in the dim light. Woven gold and bronze, with a belt of reddish crystal around the middle.

Finn was on his feet before he even knew why, walking out of the quarters quietly. He wandered the small circle that made up the freighter's interior, looking through storage units, on shelves, in cupboards and underneath seat cushions. He found what he was looking for in a corner of the engineering bay, where Rey had picked up the med-pack earlier—a thermo-blanket. He hoped to find some more water, but the ship's reserves seemed to be long dried out. He left the room with the blanket and wandered some more. Into the lounge area, with its half-moon couch and holographic gaming table set for Dejarik. There was the tiniest of kitchens but no food to make in it, apart from what appeared to be a preserver box of Kashyyykian origin. Finn examined the little window in the box and recoiled. If its contents had once been edible, he doubted that they were now.

On his way back to the sleeping quarters, Finn passed the gunner's chute. BB-8 was balancing promptly by the edge, looking down the hole. It turned its optic at Finn when he approached, letting out a short set of bleeps.

"I don't speak that," Finn sighed. He'd have to ask Poe to translate, or maybe Rey. They both seemed to understand the droid perfectly. "Is Rey down there?"

Noises from below told him that he was right. Someone was fiddling with something and was apparently not very happy about it. Finn set the blanket on the floor and climbed down the ladder into the small, spherical outcropping beneath the ship. The freighter's gravity generator was just a tiny bit off down there, making Finn feel lighter than he normally would. The anomaly was most visible on Rey, since the thinnest wisps of her hair moved as if in water when she turned.

"Thought you two were asleep," she said. The gunner's seat was upturned, its mechanical components spread out across the floor.

"Poe is. I won't be able to relax until we're out of reach of the First Order."

"And where in the galaxy would you be safe from them?" Rey asked, all too seriously.

Finn's hopes rebounded, hitting him in the face. There had to be some place, right? The First Order didn't control all of the galaxy. Far from it, in fact. But Finn knew better than that—he knew the history of the organisation, how fast they had risen from the ashes of the Empire, and how quickly their military power had grown to become the fiercest in the galaxy. He knew the relentlessness with which they occupied system after system. How widespread their operatives and spies were.

The might of their super weapon, a threat on a planetary scale although not yet operational.

_Is there really no escaping them?_

"There are places," Finn stated firmly. A lie perhaps, but how could he know? "Systems that the First Order can't reach. After we've gotten BB-8 to D'qar, I'll go somewhere the First Order will never find me."

Finn wondered if he had just said too much. But the look at Rey gave him wasn't suspicious, but rather judgemental. She looked away before Finn could defend himself, returning her attention to the hundred pieces of metal in her lap.

"What about you?" Finn asked to change the subject. "You said you were going back to Jakku. Why?"

"Why not?"

Finn frowned as if struck. " _'Why not?'_ Because— never mind. But you're a pilot! You can fly anywhere, so why haven't you left before? You got a... boyfriend? Cute boyfriend?"

"None of your business, that's why," Rey snapped, pointing a rather sharp screwdriver in Finn's face. He put his hands up apologetically and Rey sighed, obviously tired. "Sorry."

"No, I'm sorry," Finn said, feeling weariness creeping up on him as well.

They sat quietly for a moment, Finn watching as Rey continued to reassemble the chair control mechanism she had taken apart, contemplating whether he should leave or offer to help. All the while, it felt like Rey was watching him. Not with her eyes, but in other ways. Observing. _Feeling_.

"What about Poe?" she asked suddenly, without looking up.

Finn blinked in surprise. "What about him?"

"You said ' _I'll go somewhere_ ', not ' _we_ '. You seem very close, so I figured, well..."

 _Well, what?_ Finn thought. _Why would Poe want to come with me? He's a Resistance fighter, he'll want to stay with the Resistance. Besides, we've known each other for a full twelve hours. It's not like I would complain, he's the only man I know out here, but he's got a life of his own and I... I don't..._

"I don't know," Finn replied, trying not to let the sudden sadness escape into his voice. "Ask him, if you like."

Rey let the silence stretch on for about a minute, just until Finn decided that he should leave. Then she gave the smallest of smiles, too small to see, and spoke in a low voice. "Maybe _you_ should ask."

* * *

Finn returned to the sleeping quarters with the thermo-blanket under his arm. He opened the door carefully and closed it fast so that the light from the hallway wouldn't spill on Poe's face. The pilot was still fast asleep, now lying on his side facing the wall, one arm under his head and the other hugging himself, knees drawn up a little. The room was undoubtedly colder now than it had been when Finn left only ten minutes before.

He looked at Poe, then the blanket, then back. He had intended it for himself. Or had he? It didn't matter now. Finn gave it no second thought, instead unrolling the bundled-up blanket and pulling it up over Poe's body, all the way up to his shoulders. The pilot stirred but didn't wake up. Finn backed away and sat down again on the cot across the room, once again massaging his hands and fingers mindlessly. Within minutes, Poe's sleeping posture relaxed a little, the warmth of the blanket easing his sleep.

Finn laid down on his side, facing the room, one arm under his head and the other hugging himself, knees drawn up just a little. But he didn't close his eyes. He watched the rising and falling of Poe's chest beneath the blanket, sometimes diverting his eyes to the floor, sometimes the ceiling. Wondering how in hell he was supposed to feel about what Rey had said just now. Wondering how in spaces he was supposed to feel about anything.

_Poe doesn't need my help. He doesn't need my protection. He can take care of himself. He'll go back to the Resistance, to uncaring superiors and suicide missions. He might even die. I don't want him to die. I rescued him, put my life on the line to save him. I didn't do that for him to go and get himself killed again._

_I know him, but not from before. From... after. How the hell do I know him from after?_

Finn was freezing, but he honestly didn't mind anymore. He was used to engine-heated barracks for hundreds, no, _thousands_ of nameless Stormtroopers. Glorified storage facilities. The cold reminded him that he was a person—a human who could feel discomfort, who could revel in small things like getting goosebumps and not waking up after four hours of sleep sweating only to have to be on duty for another eight before getting a turn in the 'fresher.

The cold made him feel alive.

Though, it was a little hard to fall asleep when he was shivering his ass off.

* * *

_”Poe!”_

_Shattered._

_Pieces of his heart falling through his fingers._

_Like grains of sand._

_"Stay with me, please! Poe!"_

* * *

FN-2187 woke up in his bottom bunk, sweating like he usually did. His bed lay among the hundred or so closest to the end of the barrack level, where the air was moist and uncomfortably warm. He kept his eyes shut, preparing for the blinding white light that signalled the end of rest period, followed by the bellowing of commanding officers and the wailing sirens so loud that they _physically_ moved people out of their cots. None of it came. Darkness continued, nobody screamed at him and no loud noises pierced his eardrums.

_Not FN-2187. Finn._

It was the cold on his face that brought Finn back to reality. His body was warm, but his cheeks and forehead were chilly. When his senses returned to him one by one, touch and weight revealed that he was lying beneath the thermo-blanket. In the small, near black sleeping quarters of the Correllian freighter. Alone.

He didn't remember what he had seen in his dream turned nightmare. Even if he did, he would not have understood what it meant. It became a lingering sensation of discomfort, small enough to be ignored but stored for safekeeping in his subconscious. He sat up on the edge of the mattress, throwing the blanket to the side, and pressed his face into his hands hard. He couldn't have slept for more than an hour, if even that long. Poe was missing from his cot. Finn found himself hoping that he hadn't been for long, that the pilot had gotten at least enough rest to get some strength back.

He sat there for another few minutes, allowing his head the time to wake up before he stood. It never took this long to clear his brain—Stormtroopers had thirty seconds from the lights turning on until they had to be standing up straight and alert, wearing boots and armour and helmet. But it wasn't like that anymore, and apparently the drastic change came with side-effects.

The sudden sound of metal moving across metal had Finn look up in surprise. It came from beyond the door and soon identified itself as BB-8's sphere-shaped body rolling along the hallway speedily. The droid's signature screeching sent Finn to his feet, moving for the door that the droid couldn't open. He didn't know Binary, but _panic_ was a universal language. His hand had barely graced the door handle when it slid sideways out of reach and the door opened, revealing a grave-looking and dishevelled Poe Dameron.

"We have a situation."

Finn stared at Poe for a split-second, trying to read what was going on in his eyes, then pushed past him out of the room. The two of them ran to the cockpit that was screaming with lights and alert signals. Rey was in the co-pilot's seat, glaring lividly at the screens as if they were somehow to blame. BB-8 rolled in after them, beeping equally loud.

"We got it, Bee-bee, thank you!" Poe shouted in exasperation, throwing himself in the pilot's seat. Finn hovered above his shoulder, trying to make sense of what was going on. "Proximity alert," Poe explained. "Someone's locked onto us."

"Can't we jump to lightspeed?" Finn suggested. "Is the hyperdrive reactivated?"

"Yes, but it's not prepped," Poe hissed through gritted teeth, flicking switches and turning controls at an incredible speed. "Might work anyway."

"That is _not_ a good idea!" Rey objected forcefully, but she too was working the controls in order to get the ship in motion.

Poe bobbed his shoulders, grinning smugly. "But it's the best one we have. Hold on to something!"

Finn sat down in the chair behind the pilot's seat, expecting to be thrown back by the g-forces when the hyperdrive set in, but no such thing happened. The ship quivered and revved up, but then seemed to die around them.

"Compressor!" Rey cried out, hurling herself across the control panel to Poe's side, slamming a button that did not seem to belong to the ship's original design.

"Compressor?! On a YT-1300?!"

"Yes! Now go!"

Poe tried again. Finn's knuckles lost blood from the pressure of holding on to the back of the pilot's seat. Rey's eyes were large and focused, small body almost hovering in the chair from being so tense. The engine sound rose and rose, readers going crazy and hyperdrive making the whole ship tremble, but... nothing. No waterfall of stars through the windshield, no lightheadedness from trying to catch up to light itself.

"Tractor beam," Poe said darkly. Finn's whole body tensed up, Rey's eyebrows furrowing. Poe just stared at the unmoving space outside. "Whoever they are, they've got us."


	7. [TFA] Aboard The One And Only, III

Poe Dameron wasn't one for being scared. Courage was in his blood, quite literally if one considered his parents' achievements throughout their lives. A hot head and strong instincts took away the luxury of being able to pick and choose when to be brave and when to be smart. He thought the two were one and the same. But no amount of confidence or valour could defend against the terror that gripped Poe's body now. When Finn climbed up on his chair and craned his neck to see what kind of ship had latched onto them, the words that came out of his mouth threatened to have Poe throw up.

"It's the First Order."

For a moment, barely a second long, Poe was back in the interrogation chamber of the _Finalizer_ , pulled forward against the restraints by forces he couldn't explain as Kylo Ren dug into his skull. It was agonising, yes, but that wasn't the worst part. Poe had broken bones and sprained limbs enough times to handle the pain. But what Kylo did wasn't physical in any way. He had torn open a hole into Poe's subconscious, into his memories, and poked around until he found the very darkest ones. Brought them up for Poe to experience. Turned even the happiest moments of his life into torture sessions. Poe had never felt so sad, so terrified, so... _abandoned_. Kylo Ren had done things to him that Poe hadn't thought were possible, using powers that Poe had been taught were meant to do good.

All for BB-8's location. Poe had tried in the longest to stay quiet, and in all fairness he'd succeeded. Only problem was that Kylo didn't need him to _talk_ —once the masked demon found what he was looking for in the pilot's head, all he had to do was bring it forward and see. Poe had been helpless to stop it.

He'd rather die than go through that again.

Finn was thinking the same thing. He wasn't going back to the First Order ever again—by choice, in chains or even in _pieces_ —and he had a plan for how to make sure of that.

He jumped back down and grabbed both Poe's and Rey's shoulders, turning them around. "The leak in the propulsion tank. You said that it was poisonous, right?"

"Yeah, but we fixed that," Rey said, a little annoyed that Finn was thinking of such things when there were obviously more important _wait, oh..._

"Can you unfix it?"

Poe and Rey gave each other looks of understanding as Finn's idea dawned on them. Yes, they could unfix it. And even though Rey couldn't know why Finn wanted to try something that drastic, Poe could. He locked gazes with the former-Stormtrooper-helmet-wearing man before him, both smiling just a little. "You got something in mind?"

"Stormtrooper helmets only filter out smoke, not toxins," Finn proudly explained, then shot out of his chair and the cockpit. Rey was like lightning on his heel, with Poe and BB-8 right behind her.

Finn knew that he had seen them hanging in the engineering bay both times he’d been in there—oxygen masks meant for brief in-flight, out-of-ship maintenance. If what he’d imagined they’d do worked out, they should do nicely. He grabbed three and ran back out into the hallway where Poe and Rey had already pulled up the floor panels, offering them each a mask. While Rey made quick work of undoing her own repairs, the two boys struggled to get BB-8 into the hole with them.

”Careful, Finn, he’s a heavy littl—!” Poe began as he was easing the droid over the edge and into Finn’s arms, but the younger was unprepared nonetheless. “You alright?”

Finn pushed the droid to roll off of him. He sucked in a deep breath of the air that had been knocked out of his lungs and gave Poe a barely honest thumbs up. They didn’t have time for anything else.

The enemy ship had swallowed them. The freighter set down hard inside of it, shuddering and clanking as the larger ship’s signal disruptors forced it to shut down. There were people working the door in seconds. With all four passengers safely down in the maintenance shaft, Poe pulled with all he had to close the floor panel above their heads. It clanked in place not a moment too soon. As Rey continued to break open the compromised propulsion tank, Finn and Poe listened upwards. Their hearts beat like war drums, hands sweating and muscles dancing with tension.

Poe glanced at Finn in the corner of his eye and appreciated what he saw—at the very least, if they had to go down fighting, he wouldn’t have to do it alone.

The main door opened with a swish, exhausts whistling as they depressurised the cabin. From their position beneath the floor, none of the hidden passengers could see anything. But it didn’t sound like an army of Stormtroopers that boarded the freighter. In fact, when Poe counted the footsteps that he heard, he couldn’t distinguish more than two.

Everything got suddenly quiet. Rey stopped what she was doing, afraid that they’d be discovered if she made even a sound. Another half-a-minute and she’d be done, but they didn’t have that. Finn fisted his hands while Poe’s when to his belt—his empty belt—for a blaster he no longer carried. The footsteps above moved ever so gingerly, one pair sounding heavier than the other, closer and closer until they stopped...

... right on top of them.

And tore open the floor panel like the lid off a food container.

They were no Stormtroopers. No Kylo Ren with a blood-red lightsaber spitting sparks and heat in their faces. A single blaster in the hands of a man, an aged man by the looks of his greying hair and bushy brows. Beside him a species that took Finn a second to recognise—a Wookiee, tall as a mountain and covered in a shiny, chocolate brown mane. In his hands was a bow caster unlike any the three stowaways had ever seen, pointed straight at Poe's chest. Rey's arms were raised, not in submission, but as if ready to punch laser fire right out of the air. Finn moved sideways in front of Poe, but found that the Resistance fighter had already placed himself like a barrier between Finn and the new threat.

"Where are the others?" the elderly man barked after he counted the youngers beneath him. "Where's the pilot?"

"I'm the pilot," Poe said quickly, aiming to take potentially lethal attention away from Rey.

The Wookiee gave a guttural roar, the tones of his language riddled with disbelief. Rey shook her head. "No, it's true! We're the only ones on board."

Finn's head snapped between the man above them and Rey. "You can understand that thing?!"

"And that _thing_ can understand you, so _watch_ _it_ , kid!" the armed man rumbled, blaster waving in Finn's direction. Then he took a step back, gesturing upwards with an irritated frown. "Come on out of there!"

All three tore their masks off and did as they'd been told, climbing back onto the floor with each other's help. Poe kept Rey in the corner of his eye and a hand on Finn's chest, making sure to keep both at least half-an-arm's length further back than himself. Experience made him weary, but intuition said differently. There was something about the mysterious duo in front of him that he couldn't quite grasp.

"Where'd you get this ship?" the older man demanded.

"Niima Outpost," Rey said.

The old man scowled, the Wookie rumbling an ironic laugh. "Jakku? That _junkyard_?"

At that, Finn couldn't help himself. He elbowed Poe in the arm—the only form of revenge he'd ever get for being forced back to said junkyard after their escape from the First Order. Poe pretended that he didn't feel it, but Finn knew that he did. He also knew that Poe was thinking very hard right then, searching his memory for something, _anything_ , to explain the weird familiarity of the old man.

It was like Poe had seen him, maybe even met him, at some point.

The man got up in Rey's face. "Who had it? Ducain?"

"We stole it," Rey continued, more than happy to share the truth if it meant avoiding blaster fire. "From Unkar Plutt. He stole it from the Irving boys who stole it from Ducain."

"Who stole it from me!"

Poe took in the older man's appearance. A strong jaw, hazel eyes and indistinct clothes to match the age of his wrinkled face. Poe looked beyond the crow's feet and the grey-speckled stubble, mind spinning. Who is he? I know that I've... wait...

_Yavin 4. Mom and Dad's office. He let it stay the way it was after she died. There was a holo-sculpture of Dad on the desk, of him and the survivors of Pathfinder after the battle of Endor. He loved that sculpture. The man next to him, the General, was his greatest Rebel hero._

When Poe finally realised who he was standing before, he felt both incredibly honoured... and _dumb_.

"You're Han Solo," he said slowly. "This ship is the Millennium Falcon."

The reaction wasn't quite what Poe had expected. The man turned away with annoyance in his eyes walking deeper into the legendary freighter. He sounded reluctant, almost regretful, when he finally answered, "I used to be."

Finn stepped forward next to Poe, speaking close to his ear. "That's Han Solo? The Resistance General?"

"No, the _smuggler_ ," Rey corrected him, watching Han disappear into the cockpit access path. She ran after him, leaving her male friends behind, smiling in excitement. "This is the ship that made the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs!"

"Twelve!" Han called back, like he had just been offended.

" _Twelve_ parsecs!" Rey repeated, still following him.

Finn and Poe were left out in the hallway with the Wookie, positively stunned by the sudden turn of events, adrenalin draining from their veins in long exhales of relief. They looked at each other, thankfulness in their shared gaze. They weren't dead or dying. The First Order hadn't gotten to them, at least not yet. Poe felt the rekindling of hope in his chest. The universe had put them in the path of one of the Resistance's most renowned members ever. If anyone could help him get BB-8 and the secrets that it carried to D'qar safely, this was the guy.

And his trusty, equally famous partner, of course.

Poe turned to the Wookie in their company, nodding his respect. "That makes you Chewbacca. It's an honour."

Chewbacca gave a low, booming reply and a smile spread over Poe's lips. Finn felt a little disrespectful, but he couldn't for his life understand how anyone could speak _that_. Or droid, for that matter.

"You know Wookie too?" he asked Poe.

The pilot chuckled lightly. "Shyriiwook. I know enough to get by." Chewbacca growled melodiously, gesturing to Poe. "I'm Poe Dameron. My parents were in the Rebel Alliance, same as you."

There was admiration in Poe's eyes. Finn couldn't help but watch it—a sheen in the pilot's dark brown irises, proud and glistening. Whatever history he was reliving right now, Finn felt like he wanted to know it. The Wookiee opened his mouth to say something more, but was interrupted when Han came stomping back into the hallway. Rey was at his heel like a shadow, the determination on her face as intense as the irritation on Han's.

"What kind of moof-milker put a compressor on the ignition line? On the Falcon?!" he bellowed to no one in particular.

Rey shook her head in agreement. "Unkar Plutt did. I thought it was a mistake, too. Puts too much str—"

"—ess on the hyperdrive," Han finished for her.

The old rebel gave the young girl a once-over, refusing to appear anywhere near impressed. He then took a second to judge her two friends, neither saying anything in fear of tipping the scales out of their favour. In the end it didn't matter, because Han Solo was not in a humanitarian mood.

"Chewie, throw 'em in a pod, we'll drop them off at the nearest inhabited planet."

"No!"

"Wait, no—"

"You can't just—"

Rey, Poe and Finn all prepared to beg Han to reconsider. If they were stranded on some random planet in the Outer Rim, they'd all be dead within days for sure. But it never came close to happening. Chewbacca let out a determined roar to silence the crowd, followed by a short set of lower rumbles. Han shot his friend an incredulous look, eyebrows furrowed, then suddenly pointed a finger at Poe.

" _He_ is?" Han turned to the younger pilot. "You're Kes and Shara's boy?"

At the mention of his parents' names, Poe's back automatically straightened. "Yes."

For a moment, there was silence. Han took a step closer to Poe, then another, hands on his hips and head held high in judgement. Poe's chin rose as well, mouth set in a thin line. The tension between the two of them could be felt in the air right then, both deciding what to think of the other based on the next few words that came out of their mouths.

"You're Lieutenant Poe Dameron, then," Han said through a low half-laugh. "Leia's golden ace."

" _Commander_ Poe Dameron, sir," Poe stoically corrected him, never once breaking eye contact. "And in the name of the Resistance, we need your help."

"My _help_?" Han scoffed, then begun to walk away. Poe followed just a few steps, shoulders squared in defiance. "What could a _commander_ of the Resistance ever need my help for?"

"BB-8 needs to get back to D'qar as soon as possible," Poe continued. "He's carrying information that is crucial to the fight against the First Order. Leia sent me on this mission herself, if I don't—"

 _Taking too long_ , Finn found himself thinking. He hurried up behind Poe and shot out a hand, grabbing him by the shoulder and stopping him in his tracks. "It's carrying a map that leads to Luke Skywalker."

Poe turned on Finn, not sure whether to look thankful or annoyed. But the younger man did not back down, shrugging so innocently that Poe decided on the former. He nodded at Finn, setting his jaw and letting out a breath through his nose. Then he looked back to Han, leather-clad back turned. The elderly rebel smuggler had stopped walking. The shift in aura could be sensed, even heard, in the quiet that followed.

The next words came from Poe, softer now. More respectful.

"You knew him. You fought by his side for years. My parents raised me on stories of the war against the Empire. General Organa, Luke Skywalker... you."

Finn's hand remained heavy on Poe's shoulder. Rey was beside them now, as fascinated as ever, strength of mind pulsing like light around her. The three of them watched as Han Solo's mind was swayed, as his shoulders relaxed and fell, as he turned around slowly to look the memories in the face. None of them could know, not even a son of the Resistance, what Han saw right then. Three young souls, all so full of fighting spirit, resolution and naivety. A belted Wookiee behind them, so familiar and beloved, and a ship around them, homely and precious. One girl, two men.

Oh, he had seen this before.

"Yeah," he replied after a while. His eyes went to the girl, for what reason he did not know. "I knew him. I knew Luke."

_Crash!_

Five pairs of eyes looked up at nothing, searching for the source of the distant sound. The ship around the Falcon groaned and complained, metal shrieking as if tempted to break. The mood was broken, the here and now allowed to resume. While Finn, Rey and Poe were mostly confused, Chewie and Han both appeared almost scared. The two old friends looked at each other with knowing eyes.

"Don't tell me a Rathtar's gotten loose," Han sighed.

Had Finn been able to pale, he would've. "Wait, what?!"

"Did you just say Rathtars?" Poe chimed in, equally baffled.

Without repeating himself, Han elbowed his way through the young trio and jogged out of the Falcon after Chewbacca. Rey, Poe and Finn saw no option but to follow. BB-8 took matters into its own... wire-cables... having been stuck down beneath the floor until now, and hoisted itself up. It rolled down the ramp alongside Poe, following the group into the belly of the large freighter that had swallowed up the Millennium Falcon. It was spacey, well-used and not designed to be visually appealing. Han and Chewie ran for the end of the main hangar bay, accessing a data portal and bringing up a bunch of surveillance streams.

"Please tell us you're not hauling Rathtars on this freighter," Poe pressed. Chewbacca gave a roar and a shrug. "Aw, come on!"

"You're _not_ —!" exclaimed Finn.

"Yes, we are," Han said for emphasis, sounding far too unbothered for Finn's liking. He tapping through the list of live-streams on the terminal, enlarging one that showed the outside of the ship's docking site. A small but heavily armoured, colourfully painted cruiser was in the process of latching onto the freighter. "Oh, great! It's the Guavian Death Gang. Must've tracked us from Nantoon."

Off he was again, walking almost at the speed of his Wookiee companion, heading through an automatic door into the deeper parts of the freighter. His three unwilling stowaways marched after him, or at least Poe was. Finn and Rey were almost running, conversing hurriedly from either side of the Resistance pilot.

"What's a Rathtar?" Rey asked.

"They're big and they're dangerous," Finn explained, shuddering from the images in his head. "Ever heard of the Trillia massacre?"

"No?"

"Good."

Rey frowned disapprovingly. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Let's just say that you wouldn't have wanted to be born on Trillia 2," Poe began with an ominous undertone. "Twenty years ago, Empire sympathisers targeted the Trillian government by setting free half-a-dozen Rathtars in the capitol. Turns out those beasts could eat way more than just a few hundred government officials."

"A population of two-point-six million," Finn continued. "Reduced to half within a week."

"I've got three of them going to King Prana," Han called over his shoulder.

"Three?!" Finn and Poe cried together, then Finn pressed on, "How in spaces did you get them on board?!"

Han shrugged as it it wasn't a big deal, but his voice held some semblance of fear. "Used to have a bigger crew."

A series of less-than-hopeful beeps from BB-8 had Rey glare sharply at the droid. Poe rolled his eyes, sighing. "Thanks for those _inspiring_ words of encouragement, Bee-bee."

Halfway through the freighter, Han turned a corner into a dark, red-lit transport corridor. He stopped so suddenly that the three younger fighters almost crashed into him, then asked Chewie to open a heavy metal hatch by their feet. He gestured for the nearly black hole, then pointed a finger at Finn and Rey in turn.

"You two, get below and stay there," he ordered, boring his eyes into the two youngest. "Don't come out until I say so."

"What about Poe?" Rey asked before Finn had the chance.

"He and the droid stay with me until I can get rid of the gang." Han moved his finger in Poe's face, silencing the pilot's objection before he could utter it. "I gotta keep my eyes on one of you so that you don't take the Falcon, don't I? When they're gone, your friends can have you back and you can all be on your way."

Finn pushed past Chewbacca. "What about the Rathtars? Where are you keeping them?"

As if on que, a loud boom sounded from just above their heads. A window in the wall—no, the door—behind them was now filled with something grotesque. A round, slimy suction cup, veined and pulsating, attacked at the underside of what could only be a huge tentacle. Rey and Poe both cried out in surprise, Finn jumping a whole metre backwards until he bumped into Chewbacca's chest.

Han shrugged as if commenting the weather. "There's one."

Not taking his eyes off of the Rathtar, Poe put his hands on Finn's arms and prompted him to get down beneath the floor. Rey followed suit, disappearing into the dimness below, then Chewbacca closed and locked the hatch door tight. Poe brushed a hand through his hair, dirty and crusted with blood in spots, and straightened the belt in his pants.

"So what, we're going to _talk_ our way out of this?"

"Basically," Han said. Chewbacca gave a series of roars rising in pitch, suggesting that the scenario was less than likely. Poe had to swallow a laugh and Han put his ever-pointed finger in his furry friend's chest, scowling. "Yes, I do. _Every_ time. And _Commander_ here seems more than capable of talking, so we should be good."

Poe could do nothing but snort and adapt to the situation. He wished now more than ever that he still had his gun holster, but that was forever lost on the _Finalizer_. All he had now was his fists, his wits, a Wookiee and an old war hero, the latter of whom seemed far less interested in living up to his reputation that Poe had hoped.

_This is not what I had in mind when I agreed to this mission. Then again, that's why you sent me, isn't that right, Leia?_


	8. [TFA] Aboard The One And Only, IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, everyone! I'm so so happy that you all seem to love this retelling so much! I've got so many plans, so many ideas that I hope you're going to enjoy, and I literally can't wait to show them all to you. Patience, I tell myself, hehe.
> 
> Thank you so much for all the comments, kudos and Tumblr reblogs that I've received. You really brighten my day and I'm so glad to be on this journey with you. Even though the romantic going is slow, it's only because I'm aiming for a realistic development that would've gone along with the movie had Finnpoe ever been intended. It's coming, I promise.
> 
> Happy new year (late as always) and all good wishes to you, my darlings!

It didn't take long for Finn and Rey to figure out that Han Solo's plan had a major, critical flaw—he actually couldn't talk his way out of it _every_ time. Neither of them had any idea who the Guavian Death Gang was, and they didn't need to. They understood that the group had beef with Han and would not go easy on him. They could hear it in Bala-tik's voice that he'd had enough of whatever stunt the smuggler was trying to pull. It also didn't matter much that Poe was up there with them. The gang leader wasn't interested in Han's excuses, and he could literally not care less for the words of some unknown flyboy.

"Come on, gentlemen," Poe tried, putting on his most charming smile. "This discussion doesn't require a weapon's discharge."

"The adults are talking, kid, stay out of this," Bala-tik called across the hallway, every syllable laced with exasperation. "Solo, we want our investment back _now_."

"You think hunting Rathtars is cheap?" Han countered. "I spent that money!"

Finn and Rey crawled quietly along the maintenance tunnel beneath the floor, spying through the air holes in the panels. They stopped right beneath the feet of the Death Gang and stayed clear of the lights leaking through the floor. The gang members were heavily armed, some carrying multiple guns and even electro-jabbers, which were heavy, old fashioned and cruel close combat weapons. One strike if aimed correctly was enough to knock a person out cold for days.

Sweat beaded on Finn's forehead, heart aching more than it should. Han and Chewbacca were both carrying weapons—Poe was unarmed. The pilot hadn't slept more than two hours and was not fit for fight. If he was struck down...

"We've got to do something," Finn whispered. "Fast. But what?"

"I don't know, maybe—"

Rey didn't get to finish her suggestion. The conversation above their heads was going worse by the second, but now it went on a drastic decline. On the opposite end of the hallway, another door split and slid open, revealing a second group of armed thugs. Finn and Rey couldn't see them, but they heard their entrance clearly. Heavy, thudding steps and clanking metal armour-parts. Seven pairs of boots, at least. How and when a second ship had managed to dock onto the freighter was beyond any of them, and also unimportant. Finn and Rey looked at each other with concern, then turned around in the sub-level tunnel and crawled back.

Finn stopped right below Poe's position, but Rey continued on, turning a corner into another, perpendicular tunnel. Finn lashed out to grab her leg, whispering forcefully. "Where are you going?!"

"If we can close the blast doors in that corridor, we can trap both gangs."

"And Poe!" Finn hissed. He shook his head. "We can't risk it, he'll be stuck with nowhere to run."

Rey rolled her eyes and crawled closer. "Not if you get him down _here_. I'll go see if I can find the power breakers, you prepare to get that hatch door open. Okay? Then we make a run for it."

There were a lot of things that could go wrong with that plan, but neither of them had the luxury of second-guessing it. Finn nodded reluctantly. As Rey vanished into the other tunnel, he placed himself beneath the hatch door, crouching down until the angle allowed him to see the back of Poe's head through the panels. There was a ten metre gap in either direction between the gangs and Han, Chewbacca and Poe. Enough distance for Poe to climb down the hatch, so long as he could avoid the blaster fire.

Finn concentrated his thoughts, sent them Poe's way. If this was to work, they'd have to be coordinated.

And there wasn't much time.

"Your game is old," Bala-tik interrupted Han when the latter tried to stall. "There's no one in the galaxy left for you to swindle."

" _Fhr bahijie nh orue surina,_ " Tasu Leech added. Finn had no idea what it meant, but it didn't sound good.

Having been silent since he was shut down, Poe now took a step forward, hands raised for emphasis, and gestured peacefully for both gangs. BB-8 stuck close to his shin, moving its optic watchfully in both directions. "Listen, I'm certain that there's a way we can all come to an agreement. There must be a number of things on this ship that we can give you that will be worth your while."

At that, something in Bala-tik's eyes shifted. A grin spread over his scarred mouth, so sinister that Poe's own smile was wiped clean off.

"Actually, there just might be," the gang leader said. "That BB-unit. The First Order is looking for one just like it. Said it was last seen travelling with a Resistance pilot—"

Poe's arms fell slowly, fingers clenching into fists on instinct. BB-8 took cover behind Poe's legs. Below the floor, Finn adjusted his position nervously, ready to jump at the hatch door in a heartbeat.

”—and two fugitives."

Somewhere deeper in the ship's belly, Rey found what she'd been looking for. The lights in the corridor that weren't already red went out and turned back on, flashing bright-red like the others. The sounds of sliding metal doors echoed through the whole ship. Another sound followed—high-pitched and jarring—like the hungry cries of nightmarish beasts. Members of both the Guavian Death Gang and Kanjiklub startled at the noise, raising their blasters in random directions. Bala-tik never once took his eyes off of Poe, even as the ship went eerily silent.

Finn's breath caught in his throat. Something had happened, but the blast doors weren't closing.

A few moments later, the corridor erupted into panic.

"Poe!"

* * *

Poe heard his name being cried, followed by the sound of someone throwing their entire weight at something unmovable. His eyes refused to look in that direction, though, fully occupied trying to accept that the door behind the Guavian Death Gang was now filled with tentacles and teeth. Thousands upon thousands of rotating _teeth_. The slimed-up mouth in which the teeth lived spit greenish liquid in every direction, letting out screeches so shrill that they were painful to hear. Poe staggered backwards in pure shock. But he hadn't more than turned to run when he realised that the other way looked the same—members of Kanjiklub were fleeing towards him, firing over their shoulders at the enormous beast. Flailing arms and legs stuck out of the creature's mouth, but they soon stopped moving. By the time the Rathtar had devoured its first victim, Han and Chewbacca finally got a move on.

"Run, kid!" the older rebel called over Chewbacca's identical roars, then the two of them were gone up another corridor.

Poe was moving, or he intended to, but the sound of his name cut through the chaos stopped him.

"Poe! Poe, get down here! Open the hatch!"

Finn was staring at him from below the floor, fighting uselessly against the hatch door seal. Poe was on his knees in a second, putting all his strength into turning the handle. But the thing wouldn't budge, twisted too far by Chewbacca's raw strength. Finn screamed on his side, slamming his arms at the wheel, but it made no difference. Poe's sweating hands slid off the smooth metal, cutting open his knuckles, and the hatch door remained sealed.

Half-a-heartbeat. That's how long Poe and Finn's eyes met through the holes in the floor panels, chocolate brown and space black, blown wide and intense. But that moment felt like seconds, and a lot can happen in a few of those. Memories were relived, of name-taking and fire and strong hands on their shoulders. Emotions were awakened, like ripples on a pond spreading steadily until it covered the surface. Finn felt fear, but also security. Poe felt confusion, tempered by attachment. And based on those emotions that neither had the time to try and map out, a unanimous decision was made.

They both decided that the other's safety was more important than their own.

"Poe, don't—!" Finn said before the pilot could even think to move. His plea was whole-heartedly ignored.

"Get out of here, Finn!" Poe yelled over the chaos, standing back up. "Take Rey, get to the Falcon!"

Poe took off before the younger had a chance to call him back, then quickly assessed the situation. Han and Chewbacca were long gone, the Guavians scattered and screaming. The Rathtar in that direction was moving towards Poe and BB-8 at a horrifying pace, whipping its tentacles at anything that moved while simultaneously chewing up one of Bala-tik’s henchmen, legs first. Poe had intended to go after Han, but that wasn’t an option anymore. When one of the creature’s arms came close to slamming BB-8 into pieces, both droid and pilot gave shrieks of panic and darted.

”Hurry up, Bee-bee, come on!”

In the direction of the Kanjiklub faction, the second Rathtar had taken more damage than its sister. The rain of blaster fire was keeping it at bay, allowing Tasu Leech and his right-hand man a chance to get away. The two of them and Poe scrambled for an off-shoot corridor at the same time, elbowing and pushing at each other for first passage, bodies too close for weapons to be effective. But well on the other side, the path was blocked again. The first Rathtar had circled around and was chasing two Guavian Death Gang members down the hallway. Its tentacles slithered around their ankles like lightning-speed snakes, tripping the screaming thugs and dragging them right down the throat of the beast.

Tasu Leech thought fast, grabbing onto the Resistance pilot and hurling him in front of himself. Had Poe not been quicker on his feet than Tasu was in his head, his adventure could've ended right there. Poe put the momentum to use, twirling around to avoid the Rathtar's arms and pivoting around behind Tasu's henchman, using him for a shield. The man had one second to realise what was going on before he was snapped backwards and thrown head-first into the cave of spinning teeth and tongues. In the process, the man's blaster fell from his grip and clattered to the floor. Poe scurried after the weapon, grabbed it and aimed three shots into the Rathtar's mouth, mildly wounding it.

Stunned by the pain, the tentacles retracted enough for Poe to make a break for it. He lightly kicked BB-8 to get the droid to speed up, then ran as fast as he could down the corridor. At the end of it, a perpendicular one opened up. The whole ship seemed made up of rectangles, a grid network of hallways all connected to one another.

Poe turned to his mechanical friend, much like he had in Tuanul village back on Jakku—at least that's what BB-8 was reminded of when it registered its master's words. "Go that way! Find Finn and Rey! Get a ship and get out of here!" BB-8 beeped a horrified response. "Wait for me if you can but leave if you have to! Get that map to the Resistance! GO!"

This time, he didn't wait until the droid rolled away. He knew that BB-8's programming would do the right thing no matter what its AI memory wanted. Poe took off back the way they'd come, running straight at the hideous Rathtar. It had recovered now, screeching and spitting its acidic substances everywhere. Poe fired the stolen blaster continuously, shouting to make as much noise as he could, drawing the creature's attention. When he was sure that the beast had seen him, he dodged right down a corridor he had run past before. This one was narrower but still wide enough for the Rathtar to move through. Poe ran, shooting behind him, making sure the creature was following.

He had no way of knowing which direction he was going in, or if there was a way to double back to the Millennium Falcon. If he was lucky, BB-8 would make it to Finn in time and convince him and Rey to leave. If he was _very_ lucky, well...

He thought of Finn's eyes, deep like space, full of so much faith and loyalty. Warm and cold at the same time. 

_... I'll just have to hope that boy likes me enough to wait for me. Because spaces, do I like him._

* * *

"What the hell did you do?!" Finn cried out the second he found Rey. The girl was crawling through the under-floor tunnels still, searching for her friends, testing out every hatch door above them for a way out. She looked only mildly impressed with herself when Finn crawled up to her.

"I reset the fuses!" she snapped, rolling her eyes. "The _wrong_ fuses!"

Finn saw not use in causing an argument. There were no reprimands Finn could give her that Rey hadn't already smacked herself with, so he let it go. Inhumane gurgling noises and terrified screams echoed distantly from every direction, reminding them both that there were far more pressing matters to care about.

"The Rathtars are loose," he explained, trying to see through the floor holes what was going on. "I lost sight of Poe, we have to find a way up there."

"How'd you lose Poe?"

Finn's turn to roll his eyes at himself. "Don't ask, let's just move."

They chose a direction that felt right, hoping to end up as close to the freighter's hangar bay as they could. As soon as they couldn't hear any nearby fighting, they tried the closest hatch door. Many were jammed or rusted shut, but both Rey and Finn were very strong. Together they forced the rounded handle to move, one centimetre at the time, until it finally came loose and turned freely. Rey shot out of the opening like from a canon and crouched on the floor, listening intently for the screaming creatures as Finn climbed up behind her. When she was sure that the coast was clear, she took off with Finn on her tail.

There had to be at least fifty different corridors in the ship, all looking exactly the same, because both of them quickly lost their bearings after the fifth consecutive turn.

"Do you know where we're going?" Finn asked Rey, who was running ahead of him.

"Do you have any better ideas?"

Finn paused internally, trying to think while still moving. _Maybe_ , he realised. Then he listened. Not for the Rathtars or the pained cries of half-eaten space criminals. Not for the engines of the ship for orientation. He wasn't even listening for voices. In fact, he had no idea _what_ exactly he was trying to do, apart from it being what he had done in the desert market back on Jakku. When he had no idea where Poe was, his senses had told him. It wasn't clear in any way, it was just... there.

_There you are._

Finn deviated to the left, pulling at Rey's arm wrappings to make her follow. "This way!"

"Are you sure?"

 _Not even close_ , Finn admitted, but only to himself.

The corridor ended abruptly, forcing both Rey and Finn to skid to a halt. The door in front of them wasn't even just shut but _welded_ , making any idea of opening it pointless. Finn slammed a fist into the metal, quickly regretting it, then they doubled back the way they'd come. They'd only gotten a few metres when their path was blocked again, this time by something far from stationary.

A white ball coming at them at such a speed that it couldn't even slow itself down in time. Rey got on her knees and caught BB-8 in her arms, grunting with the force of the heavy droid slamming into her chest.

"BB-8!" she greeted it, happy to see it whole. "Where's Poe?"

At that, the little mechanic beeped and bleeped so frantically that Finn felt the blood in his veins slow down. "What's it saying?"

"Poe told it to find us and get out of here," Rey explained hectically. "Said he lured away one of the Rathtars so that BB-8 could escape."

Immediately, Finn's heart started racing with adrenalin. He furrowed his brown, already moving, voice dark when he spoke. "Where is he?"

BB-8 gave off unintelligible sounds and signals. Rey stood up, walking briskly after her new friend. "You don't even know what that means!"

"Nope!" Finn called back. He was jogging now, leaving Rey and the droid behind, looking around himself as if searching for something that couldn't possibly be there. Rey watched him disappear. "Go back to the ship and start her up! And don't you dare leave without us!"

Finn was gone behind a corner before he'd even finished his sentence, only the echoes of his voice returning to Rey. She sighed in frustration, already tired of the men she'd inexplicably ended up with.

"Tempting," she said to herself, then shot a look at BB-8. The droid looked back with its shining black optic, waiting for a cue. Rey thanking it silently for not running off on her like everyone else. "Come on, BB-8. We have to help them."

* * *

Poe was perfectly aware that the mission he had taken on could still end with his death. One or two miraculous rescues was no guarantee that he was getting out of this in one piece. He would, however, have preferred a glorious X-wing crash or even a First Order execution over the demise he was now staring in the face. There were pieces of human flesh sticking to the teeth inside the Rathtar's mouth, bloodied shreds of clothing and crunched up weapons still sparking. One of those crushed metal balls were his own blaster, taken from his hand right before he was cornered here.

With the Rathtar quickly approaching, he found himself wondering how fast the thugs had died after they were swallowed. He thought he knew the answer, based on the prolonged cries of agony that still bounced off the freighter walls— _not fast enough_.

Poe said a final goodbye, to his father, his General and to friends both old and new. A tentacle wrapped around his leg, tensing as it prepared to yank him forward, but then it all stopped. The Rathtar recoiled as if struck, turning around at the sound of something so heavenly that Poe almost thought he was imagining it.

"Hey, slime ball!"

He couldn't see for the volume of the creature's body, but Poe would recognise Finn's voice anywhere. The young, former Stormtrooper was standing some distance behind the Rathtar, armed with as many heavy things as he could carry—a bloodied boot, half of an electro-jabber, a com device ripped out of the wall—and was throwing them at the hideous monster. As soon as he had its attention, he let the make-shift arsenal fall from his hands and prepared to run.

"Come at me, space freak!"

"Finn, no!"

How Finn managed to get the monster to follow him by taunting it was beyond Poe's understanding. But somehow the Rathtar lost interest in its easily accessible lunch and decided to go for the escaping one, rolling into a ball and pulling itself forward by its tentacles. At first, Poe didn't move, too shocked by the sudden turn of events to think. Then he caught a glimpse of Finn through the tangle of tentacles hunting him, and snapped into action.

_Oh, no, you don't! You ain't getting him either!_

Poe ran faster after the creature than he had ever run in his life. Once more unarmed and helpless to fight the thousand kilo Rathtar—he didn't care. He ran until his lungs burned. But he couldn't catch up, and Finn couldn't get away. Just before Finn could reach a corner at the end of the hallway, the monster's tentacles managed to catch the young man's legs, tripping him painfully. Finn's chin struck the floor hard, teeth hurting from slamming together. Then he felt his body being pulled backwards. Panic gripped his every muscle and he lashed out, kicking and screaming and digging his nails into the metal flooring.

The Rathtar made to swallow him whole. One of Finn's legs were already within reach of the razor sharp, bloodstained teeth when Poe threw his entire body into the back of the creature. It didn't do much, but the beast was obviously tired of the interruptions. It twisted around, tentacles flailing everywhere, knocking Poe on his back several metres away. Then it slithered into a sideways corridor, pulling Finn by his legs after it. Poe threw himself after the young man, reaching for his hand desperately.

Their fingers touched, but it was too far. Poe grabbed into thin air as Finn slid away from him, crying out for help.

"Finn!" Poe scrambled to his feet, stumbling forward as fast as he could. His throat felt tight, heart beating like a war drum. "Finn! Hold on!"

This hallway was tighter. The Rathtar couldn't move as quickly, but it made little difference. Poe couldn't get close enough to get a hold of Finn anyway. His hands were drenched in the creature's slime, slipping from Poe's fingers whenever they found each other.

The sound of something metallic echoed in the hallway, too low for either the men or the monster to register it. A latch unhooking within the walls, machinery whirring to life for a split second. Then a blast door came shooting from its frame like a laser bolt. The Rathtar's main body was already through when the metal slab came down over it, but the tentacles dragging Finn along were not.

The door cut the limbs clean off, greenish body fluids spraying the walls and floor.

Finn, no longer held in the air by the tentacles, fell freely. Poe moved on instinct. He had just the right amount of momentum to drop to the floor and slide in underneath the younger man, using his own body as a cushion to ease Finn's drop. The weight of the former trooper knocked the air from Poe's chest, leaving him dizzy and panting.

Finn got up on his hands and knees, eager to kick the still writhing tentacles off his legs. They moved spastically for a moment, suction cups flaring and extruding its disgusting liquids. Only when they stopped moving completely did Finn allow himself to calm down. He sat down, head falling backwards, forcing his breathing to slow.

"You okay there... Finn?" Poe said, chipping for air. Finn nodded without looking down. "Then... would you mind...?"

It took a moment for Finn to realise—he was sitting on Poe's stomach. The pilot lay sprawled on his back with arms spread where they'd landed. Finn was on top of him, knees on either side of his torso, saved of another painful encounter with the floor by the pilot beneath him.

"Oh, sorry," he excused himself, quickly moving off of Poe. He offered the pilot his hand, pulling him up until they were both standing. "Thank you."

"I didn't do _that_ ," Poe said through winded breaths, pointing to the closed blast door. "That was lucky. You, on the other hand..." He poked Finn in the chest with his finger, then again, then just placed his whole palm over his shirt. He sighed, tiredly, not knowing how to word the relief that was now flowing through his every vein. "I told you to run, Finn."

"I saved your life, didn't I?" the young man smiled. His hand came up to his chest, where Poe's was still resting. He held on to it lightly and pressed it some, pulling it off and down but not letting go. "I wasn't going to leave you behind, alright? I'm not like the Resistance."

Poe looked up, surprised. For a moment, he looked almost offended, which confused Finn very much. But the moment passed and Poe's expression softened. A smile spread over his face. Finn noticed the stubble, darker than it had been on the _Finalizer_ or even on the _Falcon_ just hours before. He also noticed that he was still holding Poe's hand, although just barely.

Poe didn't seem to mind. "That's the third time you save my life. I gotta catch up."

"Yeah, you do."

"What are you two _doing_?!"

Finn and Poe's heads snapped sideways. Rey was standing there, BB-8 peeking out from behind her legs, panting as well and on her toes. She looked between the two men like they were stupid, which they supposed that they were for just standing there.

Realisation struck Finn and he gawked at their friend. "Wait, did you close the door?!"

Rey didn't care to answer, which was enough of an answer for both of them. "Come on, guys! We have to move!"

Faster than lightning, Rey shot out of the smaller hallway and vanished around a corner of the next. BB-8 beeped at the two others, pulling another smile to Poe's lips, then rolled after her.

Poe looked at Finn, only to find that the younger was already watching him. Uncertainty, but also security. Attachment. Beginnings. Without letting go of Finn's hand, Poe turned and started to run after Rey and BB-8. Tightening his hold, Finn followed right behind until they were both sprinting through the freighter. Side by side, hand in hand.

There would be time for understanding later. For talking.

For now? Survival.


	9. [TFA] If One Believes In Legends, I

The embarrassingly long time it took for the trio to find their way back to the Falcon worked in Han and Chewbacca's favour. Now Poe wouldn't have to consider leaving the old rebel heroes behind, or imagine the painful death he'd suffer at the hands of Leia Organa had he actually done it. Rey burst into the hangar from a secondary entrance, jumping over cable bundles and fuel pipes, her trusty battle staff slick with Rathtar goo. Finn and Poe trailed her closely, both armed with blasters looted off of dead gang members. Poe made sure to have BB-8 in front of himself to keep the risk of losing the droid at a minimum.

They found Han by the Falcon's loading ramp, supporting a very unstable Chewbacca. The Wookiee was holding a hand over a wound on his arm. He roared questionable Shyriiwookian curses in agony as Han tried to calm him down.

Han didn't even look surprised when the three young refugees, obviously alive, ran up to him. He immediately began barking orders, pointing to Rey first. "You, close the door behind us! Flyboy, Jacket, you take care of Chewie!"

Before Finn had the chance to prepare himself, Chewbacca was dumped over his shoulder. Poe made to help by running over to the Wookiee’s other side, but he never got there. A sealed door at the far end of the hangar slid open, spitting out three members of the Guavian Death Gang. As blaster fire begun to rain down over the Falcon, Poe grabbed Finn’s weapon from his hand. He ran over to a nearby storage crate and took cover behind it. First chance he got, he threw both his own and Finn’s blasters on top of the crate and fired at random.

”Go!” he called to Finn. “I’m right behind you!”

Finn saw not option but to obey. He grabbed Chewbacca’s arm, put it around his shoulders and guided the squirming Wookiee up the ramp. Poe’s defensive fire helped, but not for long. Soon the thugs grew tired of his little game and advanced, concentrating their own blasters on the Falcon. Sparks flew and flashed from the ship that did not yet have its shields up. Poe risked peeking up from behind the crate to aim better, but it almost cost him his life. A yellowish laser streak ran past his ear close enough for him to feel its heat, forcing him to abandon his blasters on the crate and take cover.

Rey wasn't late to see the danger. "Poe, come on!" she yelled from the boarding ramp, waving at the pilot.

Swearing to himself, Poe made a run for it, keeping himself small until he was safe inside the Falcon. Enemy fire flew around him, striking randomly. Once inside, Rey shut the door and immediately ran for the cockpit access corridor, pointing Poe in the direction of the engineering bay.

"Go help Finn, I'll help Han!" Then she was gone. Poe had no time or reason to object, and so did as he was told.

* * *

In the nearing three days since his deviation from the First Order, Finn had done a number of near impossible things—survive a planetfall crash, pull a man through a desert, save said man from a ravenous Rathtar. At the moment, those feats paled in comparison to trying to help a wounded, and frankly quite rude, Wookiee. Once he managed to get Chewbacca onto the medical bed in the engineering bay, the rest should have been easy. Wrong. Pain did not agree with the two metres tall Kashyyykian, who squirmed and roared without pause. Finn also couldn't find the med-pack, which had somehow been misplaced after he had used it to help Poe.

Like he had heard Finn's thoughts, Poe came into engineering carrying the med-pack under his arm, already unrolling a Bacta gauze. He hurried over to Finn's side, put a hand on Chewbacca's injured shoulder and pushed him down into the bed forcefully.

"Hey! We're trying to help, stay down."

Not that the Wookiee got any quieter, but at least he stopped trying to get a choke hold on Finn. The two men cooperated as best they could, holding down the injured Kashyyykian alternately while wrapping the bandage around the wound. The Bacta had a hard time penetrating his thick fur, so Poe found a tube of just straight gel and soaked the wrapping some more. The wound was bad, but nowhere near fatal, smelling strongly of burnt hair and singed flesh.

Around them, the Falcon seemed to do its very best trying to start up. Similar to how it had gone when Poe had piloted it, the ship revved and screeched, engines going hot and hyperdrive burning fuel faster than it could fill up. BB-8 came rolling into the make-shift Wookiee medical facility, beeping hurriedly to Poe about something Finn couldn't understand.

"I don't think there's anything you can do, pal," Poe told the little droid, grunting with the effort of holding Chewbacca down. "Go to Rey, help her if you can."

BB-8 acknowledged the request and bleeped a yes—Finn actually caught that tiny reply—but it hadn't moved for the door yet. Right then, Poe tied off the bandage he'd been tightening, unintentionally causing the Wookiee more pain than he was already in. Enraged and out of control, Chewbacca lashed out at nothing, catching Finn in the chest with a powerful hand and roaring so viciously that BB-8 evacuated with a frightened cry.

From the far distance of the cockpit, Han roared right back. "If you hurt Chewie you're gonna deal with me!"

"Hurt him?!" Finn exclaimed in frustration, allowing Poe to help him back to his feet. "He almost killed us six times alrea—" His call was interrupted when he was yanked forward, pulled close to the Wookiee's face by the same hand that had just hurled him away. Finn's arms shot up in submission. "Which is fine!"

"Woah, Chewbacca, let go!" Poe growled, even adding an undertone of Shyriiwook rumbling to his voice. "We're just trying to he- what the...?"

In a descending melody of engine noise and warning signals, the Falcon's interior lighting flickered and the ship died around them. Chewbacca finally silenced, looking at the ceiling as if trying to read on it what was going on. Poe and Finn did the same, then turned to each other, Finn opening his mouth to speak when, suddenly, a loud _boom_ startled them both. Poe was on his toes, hand flying up to grab Finn's arm only to accidentally smack the younger's already approaching hand out of the air. The sound was followed by the all too familiar, horrifyingly close-by gurgling of a Rathtar. Poe imagined the beast attacking the ship, wrapping its long, sticky appendages around the hull.

If the creature wanted to, it could probably stop them from taking off. Poe swallowed hard, fingers reacting on instinct, welcoming Finn's fingers when they tried to take them. Chewie gave a low, worrisome rumble, BB-8 beeping anxiously from somewhere further into the ship.

Not a full second later, the Falcon reset, restarted and buzzed to life. Poe steadied himself from experience, planting his feet firmly on the floor, one hand on a stationery table, the other fixed in Finn's grip.

With a crescendo of well-worked machinery, the hyperdrive set in and the Millennium Falcon flew off at light speed.

* * *

It was all Han, Rey and Poe could do to keep the ship from breaking itself apart. The compressor put way too much strain on not only the hyperdrive, but every fuel line, exhaust vent and heat control in its vicinity. Han knew the ship top to bottom, inside and out, but he had not the slightest clue what had been done to her in the nearly five years since he last saw her. Poe knew the type of compressor well, having seen it used several times on customised A-wing engines during his early days in the Resistance, but couldn't for his life figure out how a YT-1300 had been successfully equipped with one.

In the end it was Rey, not only familiar with the ship itself but also this specific kind of modification, that fixed the issue. She crawled in among the wireworks of the hyperdrive _while still in hyperspace!_ and worked some magic that neither Han nor Poe could understand. In a matter of minutes she had disconnected a vital power line without cutting the electric flow, moved it past a hundred highly dangerous live wires and reconnected it by hand.

Bypassing the compressor, she proudly called it. A stroke of genius, Finn and Poe said instead, giving the girl impressed grins and a number of friendly pats on the back.

With his darling ship now out of danger and his oldest friend all patched up, Han came into the lounge area, rubbing his jaw in his hand. Finn, Poe and Rey were already there. The former two sat side by side on the half-moon couch, both equally exhausted and disgusting, the latter perched on a simple stool some distance to the right, glancing thoughtfully out a viewport at the stars that rained by. When Han came up to them, all three looked up. For a moment, nobody said anything, once again drowning in the type of relief one only gets when having escaped certain death.

"Good work, all three of you," Han eventually said, allowing for the first time a smile to pass his lips. "And thanks."

"Your welcome, General," Poe replied. He stood up as if unable to remain seated in the presence of a superior. His posture straightened with the title that he carried, but his expression help the deepest respect for the man in front of him. "Thank _you_."

Han only nodded, but it was enough. A hint of approval was all Poe needed, then the old man gave the whole trio a glance. "So, two fugitives and a Resistance Commander, astray in space. What should I make of that?"

Poe opened his mouth to explain, Finn quickly reaching up to stop him. The grip on his arm surprised Poe enough to silence him, giving Rey that chance to speak first. "Finn's with the Resistance as well. I found them on Jakku, where the First Order was hunting them. I'm just a scavenger."

It wasn't the first time, Poe realised, that Rey had called Finn a member of the Resistance. However, he hadn't reacted to it until now. He shot Finn a confused look. The younger man refused to look back, hand falling away from Poe's sleeve, face set and emotionless. Poe felt a sting of pain for him.

_He doesn't want others to know. Maybe he's even ashamed. What's there to be ashamed of? He deserted! He should be proud!_

"No wonder the First Order is after you," Han commented, bringing Poe back to the conversation at hand. "If you really have that map... It's impressive that you've evaded them this long, Commander."

"I didn't."

Something dark, darker than his hair or even the space outside the viewport, came over Poe's gaze. Memories of horror so bad that he refused to acknowledge their existence, yet strong enough to be almost projected on his irises. Finn knew. He hadn't suffered that pain himself, but he knew. Few Stormtroopers had experienced the kind of torture the First Order's prisoners were subjected to, mostly because they weren't considered to be worth the time. Rebellious or ineffective troopers were shot on the spot, terminated by lethal injection or just plain thrown out into space. Finn was thankful that Rey had no idea, her blue eyes already so distantly wounded for some reason. Finn was also deeply hurting for Poe's sake.

It surprised him, though, that the same form of empathy seemed to come from Han Solo as well. The rebel General's eyes drifted away from Poe, unable to look at him. Finn couldn't not for his life understand why. Had Han also suffered at Kylo Ren's hands?

"I am sorry, kid," Han said after a while, voice deep and full with inexplicable regret.

"Don't be, General," Poe countered. He eyes spoke of pain, but his voice was resolute. Shoulders squared. Weakened knees like steel. "What happened to me is not important. Getting BB-8 and the map back to the Resistance is. If you can help us do that, then nothing else matters. Excuse me."

With only those two words as a warning, Poe walked past Han and out of the lounge hall, leaving worried gazes and a very concerned droid in his wake. Finn stood, followed on instinct, wishing to console and understand, but something stopped him. Not a feeling this time or even doubt, but a hand. Han's hand, holding firm the young man's arm until Finn looked up accusingly. The hard feeling subsided as fast as it had come when he saw the softness in Han's expression, even through the stern, wrinkled face he constantly sported.

"Better give him some time, son," Han said, nodding in Poe's direction. Then he let go of Finn and walked up to BB-8, waving at Rey by the wall. "Show me the map, let's see what it says."

BB-8 hesitated, looking for some form of confirmation that it was alright. Rey gave the droid an encouraging nod. Deciding that Rey's word was a good substitute for Poe's, it gave a beep and rolled into the centre of the room. It pointed its holo projector into the air and activated the dear secret it was carrying, displaying it like a floating 3D imagine above its head. A sliver at first, a jagged-edged shard of something larger, dotted with specks of light. BB-8 zoomed in drastically until the whole lounge area was filled with floating stars and planets. Lines symbolising hyper lanes ran in wide arches through the room, clusters of light showing where dark matter and gravity wells resided. And at the centre of it all, far from any mapped areas, a tiny gathering of planets all connected by a thin, red line.

Finn and Rey awed at the projection, so uncluttered and mysterious without the thousands of way pointers, planets, borders and space stations that usually covered maps. They had never seen anything like this.

Apparently, neither had Han.

"This map is not complete, it's just a piece," he muttered darkly. He walked among the balls of light, illuminated by their glow. His whole aura seemed so much older now as his tone gained something more than just depth—remembrance, vivid and sacred. "Ever since Luke disappeared, people have been looking for him."

"Why did he leave?" Rey asked. She was deeply fascinated, more so than Finn, observing the older man's every step.

"He was training a new generation of Jedi. One boy, an apprentice, turned against him, destroyed it all. Luke felt responsible, he just... walked away from everything." As if physically moved by his own words, Han walked away from the projection, eyes distant, then turned right back around and resumed scanning the mapped systems. "There have been a lot of rumours, stories. The people that knew him best thought he went looking for the first Jedi temple."

Both Rey and Finn stood now, off to the side of the hologram, a small crowd to witness Han's reminiscence. What they heard struck them hard, for two different reasons. Rey shone up like a sun at the word 'Jedi', much like she had back on Jakku when Finn had first told her about the very map they were now watching. The happiness of finding out that something that couldn't possibly be real in fact is. Finn, however, got stuck on something far less inspiring, something that pulled his whole awareness back to sweaty Stormtrooper bunk beds, blood-covered interrogation chairs and the screams of innocents. The screams of Kylo Rey's victims. The screams of Poe.

_We used to whisper about it. The FN unit. My fellow trainees before that. Kylo wields a light sabre, but there are no more Sith. They were destroyed, gone with the Empire. Defeated by the Jedi that somehow also seemed to vanish after that. But Ren still had it. That. The... Force, I think they called it. The Jedi's power._

_Ren was the apprentice. He must have been. He destroyed Luke Skywalker's temple, forced him into exile. Used the powers that destroyed the Empire to help the First Order. He used it to kill that old man in the Jakku village. He used it to hurt Poe._

_How could anyone expect to fight that... and win?_

The hateful thoughts in Finn's head went unnoticed by Rey, who stepped up to Han. "So the Jedi _were_ real."

"I used to wonder about that myself," Han continued. "Thought it was just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. A magical power holding together good and evil, the dark side and the light? No. Crazy thing is..."

He silenced for a moment, took a breath and let it out. Turned to the two people now listening to his every syllable.

"It's true. The Force. The Jedi. All of it... it's all true."

Finn believed it. He had few reasons not to, even for someone who had lived as censored of a life as he had.

He just didn't like it.

* * *

_I know him._

_Not from before, but from after. I don't know how, but I know it. I know him._

_Shattered. Shards of glass in his hair. Grains of sand in my arms. My blaster, unfired. That feeling when I saw him, when I heard his voice for the first time. Did I know even before that? Maybe I did. Maybe I always knew that I couldn't do it. Maybe, just maybe, I was never truly a Stormtrooper._

_Then what am I? What do I know about myself apart from that? Everything I have, everything that I am..!_

_He gave it to me. Or perhaps I took it from him._

_I know him from after, I'm sure of that now._

_The Force. A magical power connecting everything. That's insane. True, but insane._

_I know him._

_He's everything that I know._

* * *

_Maybe I should get to know him a little better..._

* * *

Finn found Poe in the sleeping quarters.

The pilot wasn't sleeping in his cot like Finn had expected. He wasn't lying in it awake either or even sitting on it. He was on the floor, slouched in the limited space with one leg spread out as far as it would go, the other bent up and leaned against the bedside on his left. His head hung heavy over the edge of the cot behind him, eyes open but not seeing, unfocused and distant. One hand on the floor tapping rhythms into the metal, the other on his sternum holding on to something small.

And he was humming. It stopped abruptly when Finn entered the room, but the younger caught it before it ended. A soft, low hum of a melody he didn't recognise. he'd only heard a couple of notes, but it was enough for him to deem it beautiful. The amount of music Finn had heard in his life was tragically limited. In fact, he knew more Stormtroopers who had been executed for singing than he knew songs.

Poe smiled at him when he came inside. "Sorry," Finn said. "Just wanted to check on you."

"No, it's alright," Poe said, waving him inside. "I was just wondering if I should go and see where you were."

Finn waited until Poe had sat up a little straighter and made room for him in the tiny space, then he let the door close behind him and sat down. It was a tight fit to say the least, but it worked. Crossed legs leaning on each other's boots, backs against opposite bedsides.

"What did Solo say?" Poe asked once Finn had made himself comfortable.

"He's agreed to help you," the younger explained. "He says it's no coincidence that he and the Wookiee found this ship. If they can track it, so can the First Order. He's taking us to some planet called Takodana. He'll find you a new ship from there that will take you to the Resistance."

Poe chuckled lightly. "Takodana, huh? A smuggler's port. If he wasn't a General, I'd question if he knew what he was doing."

"You don't have to go back."

Poe paused mid-thought, expression melting into something almost sarcastic. "Why would you say that?"

"You don't have to come with BB-8 all the way to D'qar," Finn pressed, dead serious. "Han could take it there, and the map. We could go somewhere else, far away from the First Order and the Resistance. You don't have to go back and... and _die_ for them."

"Finn—" Poe stopped, at a loss for words. He leaned forward a little, looking Finn so deeply in the eyes that it became almost intrusive. "Do you think I was _forced_ to take that mission to Jakku?"

The reply caught in Finn's throat. Yes, he'd thought that. But now that he wanted to say it, he didn't believe it.

Poe shook his head. "Finn, I was one out of six volunteers for the mission to retrieve that map for the Resistance. General Leia Organa, my superior, chose me because she knew that she could trust me. I went in knowing exactly what I was getting myself into. No backup, no help. Nobody forced me. It was my honour."

"But why?" Finn said before he could think it through. "Why would you risk your life for something like that? The Resistance is waging this war same as the First Order. It's a fight they can't win—"

"Why did you desert?"

Finn's mouth closed hard. His eyes locked with the pair across from him. They were so soft, so compassionate, so brightly fired up even when calm that they seemed to illuminate everything. In them Finn saw his own reflection, his choices over the past few days, the decisions he'd made that had shaped him into something other than he'd been made to be. So much because of Poe, but more than that as well. Emotion, instinct...

A feeling.

"Because it was the right thing to do." The words flowed as easily out of him as they had done on the _Finalizer_ , only this time they felt genuine.

"Exactly. That's why I have to go back." The smile returned to Poe's face, more affectionate than Finn had ever seen it. The next few words out of Poe's mouth cut straight into his chest, setting themselves like seeds in his heart. "And I would very much like it if you wanted to come with me."

Finn felt the seeds find a home, maybe even knew what they would sprout one day, but he couldn't accept it. Instead of a sense of security, of belonging, he felt torn. He couldn't see what Poe saw. He knew only what he'd seen from inside the First Order, and none of that gave him hope. It filled him only with dread. At the end of all the fire in Poe eyes and the resolution in his voice, Finn found only death and destruction at the hands of his enslavers. He couldn't watch that happen. He'd left the First Order because he couldn't take seeing it.

His head fell back against the mattress behind him. He sighed. "This wasn't what I came here to talk about. I wanted to know if you were okay."

"Been better, but there's no use in complaining." The joking tone was not appreciated by Poe's current company. When the concern in Finn's space-black eyes did not subside, Poe dropped the act and sighed as well. "I'm fine, Finn. I promise. You shouldn't worry about me like this. I can take care of myself."

Finn's hand had been resting on his knee the whole time. As close as they were sitting, it was nothing for Poe to reach out and take it in his own, holding it lightly but securely. Finn half expected it to be a squeeze and then nothing, that Poe would let go and then that was that, but he would be wrong. Poe help on, his own hand just a tinge lower in temperature than Finn's, his fingers a tad softer even if they too had seen their fair share of hard, skin-scraping work. Finn curved his index finger a little, making it like a hook to keep Poe's hand from slipping away.

He'd done that in the Rathtar freighter as well, he realised. Moved a single muscle in response to Poe's steady grasp. Was that all he could do? If he really wanted to keep Poe safe, like he had after the TIE crash and in the desert and in the face of the tentacled beast that almost ate them both, would the movement of one muscle really be enough?

All at once, Finn changed the way their hands were connected. He nestled his fingers in between Poe's and closed them, softly still but tight enough so that the only way Poe could get away was if Finn allowed him to. They stayed that way for a long second, then another, each seeking something uncertain in the other's eyes, each trying to read what was happening in the pulse felt through their skin.

"I don't want you to die, Poe," Finn said. It was difficult to get out, but he did it. "I don't want you to get hurt."

As seemed to be in his nature, Finn quickly learned, Poe's response fell back into humour. "Then you're making your life quite difficult for yourself. I've been told that I'm rather accident-prone."

"Can't imagine why someone would call you that," Finn replied, rolling his eyes just a little. Even as he did, he felt a smile grow on his face to match the one Poe was sporting.

With a groan of discomfort, Poe stretched as best he could and got on his feet. Finn did the same out of necessity since the space wasn't large enough otherwise, then moved out of the way so that Poe could reach the door. But Poe didn't make to leave the quarters. Instead he stood there, almost stupidly still, eyes hesitant as if wondering what to do next.

Then he did something that Finn, to his dying days, would always remember as the first time he had ever felt truly safe.

Poe wrapped his arms around the former Stormtrooper and pulled him in close, resting the younger's chin on his own shoulder. The pilot's open palms pressed lightly over Finn's back, Poe's stubbled jaw for but a moment tickling the skin on Finn's shoulder where his sleeves were torn off. Then it was over, as fast as it had begun, and Poe moved Finn to half-an-arm's length away. Finn didn't even get the chance to reciprocate the embrace, too stunned by the sudden show of affection that he didn't even know what to think.

"I know I just told you that I want you to come with me to D'qar," Poe said through a half-smile. He had the same dead-serious tone he had used back in the larger freighter, though, among the severed tentacles of the Rathtar. "I still mean that. But you shouldn't wrap your whole existence around me, Finn. You're a free man now, a man of your own making. You should do what you feel is right and nothing else. And whatever that is... I'm supportive, alright?"

Finn breathed. Only breathed. He didn't know what else to do.

"Alright," he said after a second, or maybe a minute, too long. It's what Poe wanted to hear.

What Poe didn't know was what he had just done. His words wanted for Finn to go his own way. His ears wanted for Finn to say that he would. But his arms, they said something else. His fingers, still somehow interlaced with Finn's even after the hug ended, told a different story entirely. And out of all the signals that Finn felt from Poe right then, only half of which he knew where to even begin understanding, it were the physical ones that rang true. It were the arms around his shoulders, the hand in his own, that he could agree with.

They sang the same song as the feeling in Finn's heart from the Jakku village. The same melody as the echoes of Poe saying his name.

Finn knew so much, but very little that made sense anymore. What he knew for sure was this:

Whatever he decided to do, he did not want to do it without Poe.


End file.
